It is especially important, preached the White Monk, that no one should ever find himself alone and unoccupied and feeling excluded on a hot afternoon, gazing longingly at passing groups of people. Nor should passing groups of people stare defiantly at a solitary outsider. Instead both sides should mix at once in the love of God.
Even though Timbuktu was strictly a Moslem city, Father Yakouba's Christian message was well-received from the beginning, perhaps because that caravan outpost was far from nowhere, perhaps as well because so many of its inhabitants were displaced villagers accustomed to knowing everyone they met.
In any case Father Yakouba was increasingly surrounded by enthusiastic converts of all ages and colors ranging from light brown to deep black, who in time produced a growing community of children until his polysexual commune accounted for fully half the population of Timbuktu, surpassing in size all but the largest towns between central Africa and the Mediterranean.
The story fascinated Strongbow the evening he heard it in an Arab coffee house. Before midnight he was out in the desert beyond Tripoli, magnifying glass in hand should any rare specimens appear in the moonlight, tramping south along the ancient Carthaginian trade route that led through Mizda and Murzuk to Lake Chad, a distance of thirteen hundred miles.
There he paused to soak his feet at dusk and dawn before turning west to Timbuktu, a distance of twelve hundred miles.
As one of the first six or seven Europeans to arrive in the city since the Roman era, Strongbow expected at least some kind of welcome or demonstration when he appeared in its streets. But to his surprise no one took any notice of him, the place apparently so remote all events were equally plausible to its inhabitants. Although disappointed, Strongbow recorded this fact for future use and began asking directions to the White Monk.
The replies he received were useless. A man pointed backward and forward, a woman nodded to the right and left. Wearily he sat down in a dusty square holding the flowers he had picked that morning in the desert. There was nothing else to do so he examined them through his magnifying glass.
They're very pretty, said a soft voice.
Strongbow peered under his magnifying glass at what appeared to be an elderly Arab dwarf. The tiny creature was smiling up at him. Some fifty or sixty children suddenly arrived to play in the square.
I'm an English botanist, said Strongbow.
Then you're new here and you're probably lonely.
At the moment I'm just tired.
Well won't you come play with the little children then? That always helps.
With his magnifying glass Strongbow adjusted the dwarf to life-size.
Little man, I've just walked two and a half thousand miles to meet someone called the White Monk of the Sahara, and now that I'm here I can't find him. So you see I don't exactly feel like playing with little children.
L'appétit, said the dwarf, vient en mangeant.
Strongbow dropped his magnifying glass and the flowers slipped through his fingers as the tiny old man merrily wagged his head.
Didn't they tell you I was a dwarf somewhat advanced in years?
No.
And so you pictured quite a different man?
Yes.
The dwarf laughed.
Well of course you're still very young. Would you care to come to my house for some banana beer?
Strongbow smiled.
Which is your house, Father? No one was able to tell me.
Oh they told you all right, you must have been distracted by your walk. In this part of town all the houses are mine.
Father Yakouba guessed almost at once that Strongbow was deaf, the first person ever to do so. But when Strongbow asked him how he had known, the elderly man only nodded happily and poured more banana beer.
Just then two or three hundred children ran by the bench where they were sitting in a courtyard, the dust rising high in their wake and settling slowly as they swept away.
My birds of the desert, said Father Yakouba, passing from one hour of life to another. Prettily they come with their chirpings, lightly they go on their wings. And who is to chart their course but me? And where would they alight if not in my heart? Now and then I may miss a rainy day in Normandy, but down here a rainy day is a memory that belongs to another man. You walked over two thousand miles to get here but do you know I've often made such journeys in an afternoon following the flights of my children? Yes, their footprints in the sky. You haven't begun it yet?
What's that, Father?
Your haj.
No. I haven't even considered one.
But you will of course, out here we all make one eventually. And when you do remember there are many holy places, and remember as well that a haj isn't measured in miles no more than a man is measured by his shadow. And your destination? Jerusalem? Mecca? Perhaps, but it may also be a simpler place you're looking for, a mud courtyard such as this or even a hillside where a few trees give shade in the heat of the day. It's the haj itself that's important, so what you want is a long and unhurried journey. A flight of birds just passed us, going from where to where in the desert? I don't know, but when they alight I'll have arrived at my holy place.
Father Yakouba leaned back against the mud wall, his face wrinkled into a thousand lines by the desert sun.
Will you go from plant to plant? he asked.
No, Father, I'm beginning to think not.
Good, from people to people then and a rich and varied journey is what you want, so pray you are slow in arriving. And when you meet someone along the way stop at once to talk and answer questions and ask your own as well, as many as you can. Curious habits and conflicting truths? Mirages as well?
Embrace them all as you would your own soul, for they are your soul, especially the mirages. And never question the strange ways of others because you are as strange as they are. Just give them God's gift, listen to them. Then you'll have no regrets at the end because you'll have traced the journey in your heart.
A haj, mused Strongbow, I hadn't thought of it that way.
Father Yakouba smiled shyly.
It's time for my afternoon nap now. Tell me, do you think you could do me a small favor when you return to Tripoli?
Anything at all, Father.
Do you think you could send me a bottle of Calvados? Would that be too much? It's true we change our lives and banana beer is fine, but now and again I do recall a rainy day in Normandy.
They laughed together on that hot afternoon in a dusty courtyard in Timbuktu, laughed and parted and talked for several more weeks before Strongbow left to cross the Sahara once more, pausing again at Lake Chad to soak his feet at dusk and dawn.
In Tripoli, Strongbow arranged for the first of many shipments of Calvados to his new friend and also began that enthusiastic exchange of letters, later assumed to have been lost during the First World War, that was to become the most voluminous correspondence of the nineteenth century.
The following spring in Persia, during a cholera epidemic that killed seventy thousand people, Strongbow contracted a temporary and partial blindness that made it impossible for him to read books, but not lips.
He made use of his time by having the Koran read to him so that he could memorize it. While convalescing he fasted and prayed and was subsequently ordained a Master Sufi when his eyesight returned.
But more important, at the beginning of that epidemic he had fallen in love with the mysterious Persian girl whose death was to haunt him for years. He only knew her for a few weeks, no more, before the epidemic carried her off, yet the memory of their tender love never left him. And it was while memorizing the Koran in his sorrow that he decided he would make a haj as Father Yakouba had suggested, when the time came, and that because of the gentle Persian girl it would be a sexual exploration into the nature and meaning of love.