The Navel of the Sahara

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Timbuktu, Tombouctou, Timbuctoo, Timbuch. Land of legend and limericks, crossroads of the caravans, fabled city of salt and gold. The very name evokes the exotic mysteries of travel, the place unattainable: the French even sponsored a race to this desert El Dorado and for the winner a considerable cash prize. The name is said to mean the well of Bouctou. Bouctou is a woman's name meaning she of the great navel.

Arriving at the end of nearly two weeks' odyssey in Mali, Timbuktu was for us the end of the river road. The pirogue pulled to shore at Korioume, the village that has supplanted Kabara in recent years as the dock and port of entry. We were a day early. Why come all this way to spend a scant 36 hours in Timbuktu, when for hundreds of years explorers have given their lives to reach it?

We had been warned the city was a disappointment—hot, colorless, a hotbed of ersatz Tuareg selling imitation antique jewelry. We didn't believe it, and I'm glad.

The paved road from the Niger leads to a sprawling town of clay houses, brick houses, mud houses, thatch houses—dwellings not unlike others we have seen on our journey, and much like those in Djenné. What is distinctive is that the road really does end at Timbuktu: jaundiced sand drifts over the asphalt at the outskirts of the city and never gives the road back its right-of-way. Every avenue and alley in Timbuktu is sand; the city is surrounded by sand; sand extends for a thousand miles to the Mediterranean. It is said that the nomads of the desert can find their way by the stars and by the taste of the sand. In Timbuktu, the sand does not appear to be especially appetizing.

Whatever the composition of the place, Timbuktu is definitely a place—it's there in a way Gertrude Stein said Oakland is not. When first we reached Timbuktu, I took a walk and explored its streets. The city struck me as a purposeful place with a tremendous presence. You can feel this as you walk among its old houses and see it in the stately stride of the inhabitants. It doesn't really matter if there's nothing to do in Timbuktu. Being here is enough. Who needs movies? Good restaurants? Nice hotels? Timbuktu has none of these things, and still it draws the wanderer just as it has for centuries.

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One of Timbuktu's early historic attractions was its reputation as a city of learning. From the fifteenth century on, the Sankore mosque doubled as an Islamic university of global renown. Today, at the Ahmed Baba Center for Historical Research, one can find the tarika, or historical chronicles, some of them hundreds of years old and nearly all of them handwritten. Arabic is the dominant language, of course, but French, Italian, English, and many other languages are represented.

On our visit to the center, Dr. Salem, the current guardian of the collections, showed us one of his prize manuscripts, an illuminated Koran over 300 years old. While he held in gingerly in the light, we asked him about some of the European explorers who had come to Timbuktu over the years. It turned out that Dr. Salem had written some papers on the subject. Indeed, he had found elders in Hondoubomo, a small port village, who related family legends about the bearded tubobu who came down the river so long ago—the first white man they had seen.

Intrigued, we set out for Hondoubomo to do a bit of field research of our own. Nobody knew anything about Mungo Park in Kabara (or nobody would say they did), even though Mungo's guide Amadi told of landing here. In Hondoubomo, however, we decided to inquire among the council of elders. We gained permission from an elder to approach the senior official, then sat in his garden while the other old men of the village arrived. Everyone sat cross-legged in the late afternoon, with the Niger flowing serenely within sight above the courtyard wall, as three old men were helped into the garden by their peers.

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Alberto arranged for a young man to buy sugar and tea as our cadeau, our gift for the elders. Once the gift had been presented and accepted, our questions about the bearded tubobu were posed in English, translated to French, then to the Songhai that the elders understood. There was a ritualistic feeling to the inquiry, and dignity and solemnity, which we all found fascinating but learned little from. There is a limit to oral traditions and with 200 years intervening, memories blow away like the sand. We were chasing the shadow of a ghost.

Still, there was one old man with a story to share. He recalled hearing that "sails came to his fishing village from a white man long, long ago." The only white man to sail to Timbuktu was Mungo Park.

With that, we found a fleeting link to our man Mungo. Another goal of our expedition was to find a place to shoot a panoramic photo, a 360-degree Surround Video that would allow everyone on the Web to see what it was like here in the navel of the world. The natural place to look was at high ground. As in Djennéé and the other towns on our itinerary, high ground in Timbuktu is occupied by mosques. With the help of a young Tuareg named Azima, we sought out the guardian of the city's largest and most celebrated mosque, Djinguereber, and asked his permission to scout out the view. He told us we were free to come up on the roof, but not right now, as it was time for prayers.

Muslims pray five times a day, to the east, toward the rising sun, in the direction of Mecca. We had seen this ritual many times during our travels. A few times we had pulled over to witness the synchronized bowing, silent prayer, and powerful devotion then continued on in our planned direction. Now there was an intersection between our purpose and theirs, our desire to bring the big picture of Timbuktu to our audience and their obligation to communion. An imposing man with a shaved head spoke with Azima for a moment, then turned to me.

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"Come and pray with us," he said. "We all seek our God, we all must speak with Allah — Christians and Jews and Muslims. This is a holy place for speaking with Allah. The doors are open to you. Please join us."

I looked at Alberto and he at me. Almost simultaneously, we shrugged. Why not?

We took off our sandals and entered the cool dark corridors of the mosque. My feet stepped on woven mats as I followed the bald man, the mullah's son, through the halls to the open courtyard within. An assemblage of men stood facing the eastern wall, where the aged mullah stood in waiting. Azima, Alberto, and I wound our way to the back of the group. Following Azima's lead, I stood at the edge of the mat and waited for the prayer to begin.

I must confess to a moment of hesitation. And doubt. What was I—a Christian by name, a Jew by patrilineage, and a skeptic by nature—doing here? I considered the forces that had brought me to Timbuktu and the momentum of the past few days. After our pilgrimage across the Sahel and up the Niger, after nights with griots, after sifting through the graves of the Tellem with Dogon companions, after a midnight encounter with animistic exorcism, I had nothing to lose—and perhaps a soul to gain. I fell to my knees, touched brow to mat, and lifted my heart in prayer, in the Djinguereber Mosque of Timbuktu.

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