The Meq (41 page)

I wanted to leave the next day, but that was impossible. It took Emme another three weeks to gather and pack the provisions we would need. Finally, we left Dogon land some time before my birthday, in 1907. I had no idea of the exact day or week. I would soon find out that days, weeks, even months, had little significance where we were going. The hard fact that Star would turn seven years old that same calendar year made my own birthday meaningless. Sailor might not have agreed, but that’s the way it was.

PoPo insisted on going along as far as Gao, on the Niger River, which made Emme insist on bringing two cousins with us to assist PoPo on the return journey home. The donkeys were loaded down and our progress was slow and tedious. I brought a single suitcase stuffed with my things and Ray’s. I had to flatten his bowler slightly, but it was not possible to leave anything of his behind. I wore the money belt under my clothes and around my waist at all times. The gold and gems would be necessary for everything from information to camels. Emme thought we should travel poor and keep to ourselves, but I remembered something Solomon had taught me long ago—“Poverty often ensures no response, while gold is an international language.”

Outside Gao, Emme unpacked one of the bundles on her donkey and laid out several robes and scarves. They all had a deep blue sheen and were the traditional color and cloth of the Tuareg, the “blue men” of the desert. In another bundle she brought out an assortment of bracelets and earrings made of silver, all inlaid with colored stones in geometric patterns. She put two big silver loops in her ears and handed me a short dagger made of serpentine.

“What do I do with this?” I asked.

“All Tuareg men wear it above the elbow of the left arm. It is called an
ahabeg.
”

“But I am supposed to be a boy.”

“Wear it anyway,” she said.

She carefully arranged a blue scarf on her head, leaving her face uncovered. The scars on her temples were not visible, but the Ancient Pearl in her nostril stood out against her dark skin and the dark scarf. Then she began wrapping the turban-veil, which she called the
tagelmust,
around my head and face. Only my eyes were left exposed. She told me that it was more than just protection from the desert sand and sun. Tuareg men never removed it in front of others as a show of respect and also believed it repelled “jinn,” or evil spirits. It would be a perfect disguise and keep my identity hidden without arousing suspicion. She explained how the Tuareg were feared throughout the Sahara because of their legendary capacity for revenge. Being a young woman and young boy traveling alone, acting as Tuareg might lessen the chance of attack. It was good logic and the clothes were loose and comfortable.

I briefly thought back to China and how uncomfortable Geaxi and I had been in the heavy monks’ robes that Sailor had made us wear. For another moment, the first in a long time, I smiled to myself and wondered where they were and what they would be doing. Then I thought of where I was and what I was doing and I could barely answer that. I decided I should at least send a letter to Owen Bramley.

Emme and I walked into Gao while PoPo stayed on the edge of the desert with the donkeys and the two young cousins. He told us he had no desire to see any more towns. “They are only sinkholes of gossip and money,” he said, “and I have no need of either.”

The outpost town was tiny and we easily found the one government building that served all civil purposes from jail to mail. I sent Emme in to post the letter. It contained few words, almost no information, and little truth. It was the best I could do. The letter was this: “Dear Owen—I’m still alive and so is Star—I will find her—it won’t be long—Z.”

I asked Emme how much time it might take for the letter to reach St. Louis. She said there was no way to know for sure, but it could take five or six months. Five or six months, I thought; maybe I could beat the letter with a telegram that said I’d found her.

Emme seemed to read in my eyes what I was thinking. “Do not think ahead,” she warned, “the Sahara will not allow it.”

Later, outside Gao and near sunset, we said good-bye to PoPo. The old man made a formal farewell, sitting straight, as always, on the back of his donkey. He removed his strange hat and then looked down at me through his monocle-on-a-stick. He said, “I wish you well, Zianno Zezen. I know you prefer ‘Z,’ but one does not call the first drink of water from a deep well by a nickname. Please, if you can, watch over my granddaughter and ignore her complaints. She is a proud girl, much like her mother. She has a keen mind, but her heart wanders.”

PoPo stayed where he was with the two young cousins while Emme and I headed north into a haze and horizon that had no definition. I turned and waved farewell, thinking I would surely see the old man again someday. It is a simple thing you tell yourself, not even a thought, really—more of a notion, a feeling that time and events will bring you back together in a future that is taken for granted. It doesn’t always work out. After that last glance and farewell, I never saw PoPo again.

It is difficult for the Meq to talk about Time. To the Meq as individuals, time is not a question of gain or loss, and saving time is absurd. Without physical change, time is an internal concept and only distance, whether from a person or from a goal still unaccomplished, feels like a loss of time. Perhaps there is a crossroads, a paradox, a place where strangers, both Giza and Meq, wait in the twilight and the loss of time has no bearing at all on the only thing that can be found in Time and truly missed—love.

In the first few months of going deeper and deeper into the central Sahara, and traveling now on camels instead of donkeys, my thoughts continually revolved around Time. We were chasing Mulai and Jisil al-Sadi, and any information concerning their whereabouts became harder to get and less specific. It was more frustrating than it had been in China searching for Zeru-Meq. Their entourage included hundreds of people, camels, horses, and everything that went with them, all moving at will across political, geographical, and tribal boundaries like ghosts. The word Sahara is Arabic for “sand sea” and the al-Sadis seemed to sail through the desert on an outlaw ship with its own charts and ports. Emme asked questions and often got nods of recognition and stories about Mulai, Jisil, and sometimes Hadim, but not a single direction.

For many months we traveled, generally heading west through Araouane and Tichit, never finding their camps or coming close. Emme refused to get discouraged and we drove each other on. She was concerned, however, that as time went on, Star would not welcome us as friends or liberators. In her mind and body, even spiritually, she would be nothing more than a slave to Mulai and Jisil. Emme was certain of this. Star’s captivity by the al-Sadis became something we rarely talked about, never doubted, and followed obsessively. The drone of distance, time, and silence became a cocoon and a companion. We lived day to day, season to season, and eventually traveled in every direction without calendars or clocks. From the Ahaggar in the east to the Adrar in the west, we journeyed and searched, year after year, never relenting, never stopping.

In the beginning, we both seized any opportunity to send a note or letter, Emme writing to PoPo and me to Owen Bramley mostly. I wrote one letter to Carolina, but after reading it I tore it up because there was nothing in it. I never mentioned Ray in my letters. I rarely mentioned myself. The letters were more like postcards from no one describing nowhere. As the letters from both of us became shorter and less frequent, our obsession grew. Obsession is a clever and insidious drug. It drove us on and isolated us simultaneously. Human contact only served as a source of information and fuel for the pursuit. The extremes of heat, cold, wind, distance, and especially time affected us less and less. We were insulated in our cocoon, our obsession, and obsession is an amazing eraser of time.

I remember the night we were camped to the west as far as we had ever been, in a bleak and desolate stretch of desert beyond any traditional or commercial trade routes. Emme said we were only miles from Nouadhibou, or Port Etienne, as the French had renamed it. The sun was still an hour from setting and I turned toward the west and stared at the endless dunes and hills. Emme was tying the camels outside our tent and the only sounds to break the silence were our own voices and the groans from the camels.

“Look there,” she said, and pointed low on the horizon.

I looked and saw a string of black dots weaving in the air over the dunes, flying north to south.

“Ringdoves,” Emme said, “migrating down the coast.” She paused and we watched the birds until they were gone, then kept staring into emptiness. In minutes the temperature had fallen fifteen degrees. I found blankets for both of us and we sat in silence while the sky darkened like a bruise, then filled with light. Emme’s eyes seemed to glaze slightly, but she wasn’t crying. She looked up at the great Milky Way and pointed at the bright dancing star that was Sirius. “The earliest Egyptians called it Sothis,” she said. “They believed it was the home of departed souls. The Dogon believe the same thing.” She wrapped her blanket tighter around her shoulders and looked at me. “What do the Meq believe, Z?”

I only hesitated a moment. It was an easy answer or, as Ray liked to say, clear as a tear. I said it once, then realized how very true it was. I heard myself say it again. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”

Several weeks later we were gathering fresh supplies somewhere outside Tindouf, a traditional stop on the old caravan routes and a place where many tribes crossed paths for trade and gossip. I asked Emme if the man we were trading with could tell us the month and year. When he answered, I was shocked but Emme showed no reaction. Maybe it was because she was used to the natural, internal changes of her own body. Or maybe she had seen in her reflection the aging around her eyes and in the hollow of her cheeks, all things that never occurred to me—the boy, the Meq, the one who should not have been surprised. The man told her it was January in the year 1916.

Almost nine years had passed and we were still searching for the al-Sadis and Star. Nine years of crisscrossing the desert and its wells, trading centers, oases, and caravan routes, asking questions that were dangerous, hiding the gold that I carried, watching Emme get us in and out of places no western traveler would ever see. Nine years of learning to navigate by wind and stars, and learning a nomad life of survival that had not changed for millennia. Suddenly, for that one brief moment, it seemed time, distance, and the Sahara itself had swallowed all of us up.

My despair lasted the rest of that day and the next. I wandered through the open markets alone and sat for hours by a crumbling stone wall, staring at a lone acacia tree on the horizon. It was bent with the wind, permanently twisted and stretched, bare and isolated in the landscape, yet surviving. I thought continually of Star and her life. I thought of the Fleur-du-Mal and myself, then just before sunset of the second day I stood up and turned away from the tree and ran to find Emme. I had a hunch and, ironically, that was all we needed.

Emme had mentioned years earlier that Mulai and Jisil al-Sadi bred, trained, and traded
mehari,
the racing camels dating back to the earliest caravans. While I was loitering in the streets and markets, I overheard several excited conversations, some in Berber, some in Tuareg, between various groups of nomads, concerning a wedding and a camel race that would follow the celebration, occurring outside Tindouf in one week. The best and fastest camels from many tribes and distant points of the Sahara would be there. My hunch was that the al-Sadis would be among them. After I told Emme, she was amused at first, thinking it more than a long shot, then changed her mind and admitted it was at least a possibility.

The week passed quickly and on the morning of the wedding Emme and I were up early and scouting the race grounds and surrounding camps, still wearing our Tuareg clothing, but steering clear of all Tuareg encampments. By midafternoon, the wedding party arrived in clouds of dust, loud cheering, and clanging cymbals. The races began shortly after, with fifty or sixty camels and their drivers, snorting and yelping and coming off all at once from the starting line, which was a quarter of a mile across. Emme and I found a place to watch, standing next to a ragged group of camel drivers and slaves. The drivers were Tuareg and two of them nearest to us wore gold rings in their ears and bracelets made of ivory, silver, and turquoise up and down their arms. None of the others wore jewelry as rich and plentiful. It was unusual and Emme and I stayed near them just to listen. With our Tuareg turbans and veils masking our faces, they spoke freely without fear of an outsider’s presence. Their dialect was one I had never heard. Emme said it was archaic and used by only a few tribes, including the al-Sadis. She translated as they spoke, but two minutes into the race I didn’t need it. I distinctly heard one of them yell “Mulai!” and saw him point to the man who was leading the pack. I only managed to turn and look at the man for a few seconds before the whole group passed and he became invisible in the dust and sand. He wore dark blue from head to foot and gold strands were woven into the cloth, making it sparkle in the bright sunlight. Then Emme leaned over and translated what I couldn’t understand. They were also yelling, “My chief! My chief!”

Finally, we were in the right place at the right time. I glanced at Emme and she gave me a quick look, then stepped over to one of the camel drivers and grabbed his sleeve. I had no idea what she was doing or that she was going to do it. She lowered her veil and told the man that our chief wished to buy camels from Mulai al-Sadi—good camels—
mehari;
we would pay in gold. The man stared down at Emme and looked her over slowly. The other man came closer and looked at me, then focused on the pearl in Emme’s nostril. This was dangerous business. I knew they would either believe her now, or not at all. If they believed her now, we would have many doors open for us. If not, we had been exposed once and for all, and would most likely be killed by decapitation as soon as we left Tindouf.