The best time to wander comes later, when the great disabling heat of the day is over. Then I happily potter in a warren of back streets, stepping over an open latrine to look more closely at a plaque announcing the house of one of the greatest Saharan explorers of all. ‘Heinrich Barth 1853-1854’. Barth travelled thousands of miles across the desert and did live to tell the tale, becoming professor of geography at Berlin University. I buy bread straight out of one of the cone-like ovens that dot the city. The bread is good - light, and with just a hint of that familiar gritty texture which tells you, as if you didn’t know by now, that you are back in the Sahara.
The local people are not the extroverts of Dakar or Bamako, but though they’re wary of us, they’re curious at the same time. I fall to wondering if I’ve been too hard on the city. Maybe, after eight weeks on the road, it’s me that’s knackered, not Timbuktu.
Day Fifty-Three
TIMBUKTU
Up at seven. In the courtyard of the Relais Azalai a little bird, crown and breast dusted red, skitters amongst the lacework of bougainvillea bushes, tired and dry in the already intense heat. A boy is watering the mottled garden, valiantly but hopelessly, with a thin, trickling hose.
Reception is quiet. The beady-eyed salesmen who patrolled it last night, robes full of unmissable bargains, are gone. A solitary figure in crumpled blue and white robe lies curled up on one of the chairs, eyes shut, breathing deeply. Suddenly, without warning, his hands shoot out and with a resounding crack he clamps them either side of a mosquito. He examines his victim briefly and settles back to sleep.
It turns out that this is Mohammed, a camel owner who is taking us out into the desert to meet a caravan returning from the north and to help us find one with whom we can travel on from here.
He pulls himself wearily off the chair and greets us all with a handshake, though he says nothing.
It’s only later, when I hear him talking with a friend, that I realise his voice has almost gone. The words squeeze out in a husky croak, and I wonder if this is a price he’s paying for a life lived in the scouring sands of the Sahara.
A few miles out of town, past the nomad encampments, where the sand is dark with sheep and goat droppings, I climb to the top of a dune for my first sight of a camel train. A long, elegant procession breaks the perfect symmetry of blue sky and brown sand as it picks its way towards us. There are thirty or forty animals, all single-humped Arabian camels, properly called dromedaries, roped together in single file. I try to imagine what a sight it would have been in the heyday of trans-Saharan caravans, when 20,000 camels crossed the desert at a time. Today’s modest column is led by a wiry Touareg with his black headdress unwound and draped around his neck. A sprawling herd of goats crosses their path. Industrious dung beetles scuttle about in the sand beneath my feet. A man in a vivid yellow robe appears on the crest of a nearby dune, accompanied by a young boy. He watches us watching him, and yawns. This must be the nearest the Sahara gets to a rush hour.
The camels draw closer, moving with a careful gait, noses upturned, as if finding the whole thing intensely distasteful. On every one of their backs are slung two glittering silver-grey slabs of salt. I half expect to find commandments written on their sides. In fact, the only inscription on the tablets is the name of the owner, marked in red dye.
Mohammed greets the leader of the caravan, and whilst they talk the camels fold themselves gratefully down onto the sand, like collapsible tables, front legs first, back legs folded in neatly beneath their behinds. In motion and in repose these are graceful animals; it’s just the bit in between that’s a mess.
The blocks of salt they carry each weigh around 50 kilograms, over 100 pounds, so those camels with four on their backs would have been hauling almost a quarter of a ton of salt across the desert, fourteen hours a day, for the past three weeks. No wonder they are so happily sighing, gurgling, chomping and farting their appreciation at having arrived in Timbuktu. I wonder if they instinctively knew that the end was in sight, could perhaps sniff the waters of the Niger, onto which their burdens would soon be transferred and shipped downstream to the markets of sub-Saharan Africa.
The bad news is that, after talking to the leader of the caravan, Mohammed establishes that, with high summer and infernal temperatures just beginning, no more salt caravans will be entering or leaving Timbuktu for several months. If we really want to travel with a camel train, we will do better to head east, where there is still a regular salt run across the Tenere Desert between Agadez and Bilma. I have read about the Tenere. Set almost at the centre of the Sahara, it has a reputation for stark beauty and fierce heat.
Back at the hotel, my resolve falters. No-one, I’m firmly assured, will be in the heart of the desert in high summer. The nomads move south and will not return until after the rains, which will render much of the route impassable until they end in August and September.
So we decide to follow the ancient desert ritual of migration and return home. We shall use an English summer to cool off until the Saharan summer has burnt itself out.
NIGER
Day Fifty-Four
NEAR INGAL
There are, at a rough estimate, one and three-quarter million nomads in the Sahara, of whom about a million are Arab and half a million are descended from pre-Arab inhabitants, like the Berbers of Algeria and Morocco and the Touareg, Toubou and Fulani of the central and southern Sahara. Every year a substantial number of these transient populations converge on the town of Ingal, 70 miles west of Agadez, in the Republic of Niger, for a grand get-together called Cure Salee. It means, literally, ‘salt cure’, a celebration of the fattening of the cattle after the summer migration.
It’s the beginning of September when we return to the Sahara and though the sun is still powerful, something is different. The desert air is humid. The hard brown earth is covered in a thin fuzz of green grass. The rains have come and transformed a desert that is always ready to blossom. Where there was only sand a few weeks ago there are now small ponds and trees waist high in standing water. And the Sahara is no longer a bug-free zone. At dawn and dusk the mosquitoes are out, malarial and dangerous.
The bush is busy with people, moving, like us, towards Ingal; but unlike us they are walking and have walked several hundred miles with their families and their animals to the summer grazing in the south and back again. We fall in with a group of Wodaabe, a pastoral and nomadic branch of the Fulani people, who are found right across the southern Sahara from Senegal to Chad.
They carry their goods on donkeys or on their backs. Most of them are barefoot or wearing flip-flop sandals. Their legs and feet must be immune to the sharp burrs that lurk in the tussocky grass, attaching themselves to skin and clothing, stabbing and pricking and defying all but the most delicate attempts to remove them.
Mothers carry the smallest children on their backs, but any child above the age of six or seven is at work, leading a donkey, carrying a lamb or keeping an eye on the sheep and goats. The older boys and the men are preoccupied with the cattle, the wealth of these families and virtually their only tradeable asset. Survival of the cattle is the reason they have made this long march and, now, when their beasts are fattening and their assets are so close to being realised, their protection has never been as important.