On the River
at Last

When we left the village of Goummou, one of the Dogu gave me a small statue. I was touched but a bit overwhelmed: the simple carved icon was caked with dried offerings and smelled of blood. I put it in my backpack and forgot about it during the long afternoon drive back to Mopti.

As soon as I entered my hotel room that night, one of the porters knocked over a lamp with my backpack. The bulb flared brightly and went out. We tried the other switches, but the power was gone. A few minutes later the hotel's electricity went out completely. Strangely, the generator was fixed and electricity restored to much of the hotel, and though it surged on and off all night, as far as I know my room was the only one that never regained juice. Perhaps there was a conflicting force at work. I took the icon out of the bag, set him up on the table, and let him look around.

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Mopti is a melting pot for many people who work and trade in central Mali, and the busy port itself is surrounded by small encampments of Bozo, Peuhl, Bambara, and Songhai. Just as it must be a good place to converge upon, it's a good place to leave, and we happily left it behind at noon. Our destination: Konna, some 50 kilometers up the road, to catch the boat we'd use to float the Niger to Timbuktu.

"Konna is the last town on the road," Alberto tells us. "From here to Timbuktu, just river travel. These people—" he gestures to the Bozo campement of small round huts—"travel only by the water." Bozo villages are spread far apart, and the temporary encampments that spring up between them are abandoned with the tides.

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We pass one now—a collection of a dozen huts of ill-defined shape, with twig frames, woven walls, children bouncing happily along the shore waving to us. The men sit in cross-legged solemnity, impervious.

Our pirogue is about 40 feet long, 8 feet wide at its thickest, a needle piercing the water—roughly the size of the boat Mungo Park patched together on his second, and final, trip to the Niger. A thatch roof arches above most of its length, save for the very front and the simple coal kitchen toward the stern. With the intensity of Pays Dogon behind us, the gentle rocking of the boat is soothing. Our trip has been a mind-blowing experience so far, an immersion in a root level of reality that I've only read about. Dogu and Dogu and the Hunter and the Boy were people in whose auras we could stand, whose odor we could smell, whose rough hands we could touch, whose smiles warmed us. It was the right experience for us, with the right people at the right time. It passes behind us like the smooth wake of this pirogue into the dusk, and I recall again the lesson that there are no regrets on the river. There is only the future unfolding like the night sky above us, as we travel the river road to Timbuktu.

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At camp Alberto sets up a Coleman lamp. It hisses in the dusk. The mosquitoes gather and swarm, and I notice a cloud towering above the lamp, twisting in the wind of its own frenzy. We're amazed to see the cloud condense and converge on the lamp, and then we begin to smell the burning of thousands of bugs as they ignite. The light actually dims, then glows eerily; an inferno of cremating insects blazes inside the chamber. Alberto wraps his turquoise taguelmoust around his face and races into the cloud, turning off the lamp and escaping in a few moments. But the lamp keeps burning for over a minute, the combustion of burning bugs perpetuated by its own energy.

We sleep by the riverside, after dining on Italian white and the large fish of the Niger, capitaine. Its meat is firm and white, and when grilled over the coals, its skin blackens nicely. It can be served on brochettes, as fillets, smoked in thin slices. We've had it every which way and have never been disappointed.

It doesn't take long for river time to take over, for the world to reconfigure itself into a stream. We ride the flow toward the north, then the east, then the west. The Niger meanders and wanders in the desert, expanding first into Lac Débo and then narrowing to a bayou of channels. This expansion into Lac Débo might have given rise to the long-standing rumor that the Niger flows into a great lake in central Africa, there to evaporate beneath the desert sun. Perhaps at one time in geological history the river did flow deeper into the Sahara, but in historical times it has always flowed northeast past Timbuktu, then made a great bend southward, eventually flowing to the Gulf of Guinea.

When we stop at villages the children surround us, laughing when the flash of my DC-50

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explodes as I take their pictures. There are so many of them they raise a cloud of dust, and Denise carries her camera above her head, like a native woman bearing water. At one point we split up to divide the load of the attentions, and after a moment of confusion there are two groups: the women, girls, and small boys follow Denise; the young men trail after me.

As we slip toward yet another sundown, the sandy frontier of the Sahara on river left, the grassy plains of the Sahel on river right, I feel at home, carried by this current. Our driver is a Muslim who prays to himself several times a day—not ostentatiously, but not shyly. His girlfriend is along for the ride, and there's a young assistant to learn the river trade.

We doze, wake, listlessly prowl the boat, doze again. Now when we approach villages, we don't even bother to get out, we think only of our goal, Timbuktu. In this short time we have become like Mungo Park, who in his last letter home vowed to "keep to the middle of the river ... till I reach the termination of this mysterious stream."

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