The Moon Girl
by M. Shayne Bell
“What do you make of this book, Kevin?” François Brissot asked me one evening in the National Archives of Niger. He handed me a book bound in black leather, dusted clean. I opened it slowly, in the middle, but it still crackled. The pages were brittle and crumbling around the edges. It was evidently a journal, written in black ink, the last half of the book’s pages blank. I tried to read some of the words in the dim light. We hadn’t yet turned on the one light bulb Brissot allows us after dark—the electricity costs the archives too much, and he has to conserve. Though I sat by a window, the sun had nearly set and the light was almost gone. It was difficult to read.
“It’s in English,” I said finally, having made out a few words.
Brissot laughed and walked off. Of course the book was in English. Brissot hands me everything written in English. I go there to help him recatalog the holdings of his archives, as he thinks of them, left in chaos after the Nigerian withdrawal from Niamey at the end of the Water War. “I am too old to find patience for your English,” Brissot had once told me. He reads English, but slowly. Since English is my first language, I can quickly tell what a document is, who had written it and why, and mark it for future filing. I never expected to make it through the archive’s English-language holdings that summer. Brissot does not expect to finish sorting out the mess the Nigerians had left him in what remains of his life.
I set the journal on the table in front of me and carefully opened the cover. The first page was blank, but the second was signed Robert Adams and dated 23 May 1817, Agadez. It was the journal of an Englishman, of course. English men and women seemed to have walked everywhere in the world, curious about everything, recording the tiniest details of their journeys in the remarkable journals that I, at least, still love to read. I hadn’t realized that a European had made it to Agadez that early. Brissot keeps a list of all known European explorers in Niger and their writings in the hopes of collecting, if not the primary documents themselves, at least copies of the journals and letters. I looked around for Brissot to ask him what he knew about Robert Adams, but Brissot was nowhere in sight. I checked the encyclopedias, but found no mention of a West African explorer named Adams, nor was he on Brissot’s list.
There is a table and chairs by the encyclopedias, under the one light bulb. I turned it on and sat there to read. The journal was evidently not the first Adams had kept, since the narrative begins in medias res. What follows are his words.
Abdullah and I breakfasted on figs and goat’s milk cheese and took leave of our host before sunrise, but the gatekeeper again would not let us leave the city as we had been promised. I stood at the gate with the few belongings left me—principally these journals and my compass—packed in bags tied on the donkey the Sultan had sent us, the faithful Abdullah at my side, he as anxious to depart Agadez after our two-month detainment as I.
I argued with the gatekeeper, using the little Tamasheq I can now muster, since that is what he spoke to us. I demanded to see his orders, but of course he produced none and began to threaten and curse me. Abdullah also spoke with the man, but to no avail. He would not open the gates; he insisted he had orders against it; so I turned the donkey, led it behind me, and slowly walked with Abdullah back to the house that had been our prison these past two months.
Our host, Jubal Ibn Faleiha, stood in the street outside the gate to his courtyard, talking with great happiness and animation to two other Mussulmen all dressed in similar white cotton robes, but when he saw me approaching him again the happiness left his face, though he greeted me and said: “Six times have I blessed you in the name of Allah, Robert Adams, and watched you leave my home to start your journey back to the land of the Christians, and six times have I watched you return to me. Allah be praised.”
It occurred to me to ask him not to pray over us the next time we were told we could leave Agadez, to ask him to let my prayers be the only ones offered, but I remembered that Abdullah always prayed to the same Allah as Ibn Faleiha, so I said nothing since in any case prayers of thanks to Allah were certain to be offered upon the slightest hope of word that we could leave.
At noon we learned the reason for our stillborn departure. The Sultan sent a messenger who asked for me, and when I was called into the courtyard he bowed many times and told me the Sultan requested my presence at dinner that night. I told the messenger I would do as the Sultan wished and attend his dinner. After the messenger left, I begged water to wash in from a serving girl of Ibn Faleiha. She pretended not to be able to understand what I wanted, though for the past two months I had spoken with her in Arabic, asking her for water and food.
I went through the house asking each person I met for water and finally, back in the courtyard, I met Ibn Faleiha himself and asked him for water. He appeared surprised and put upon by my request, though it must have been he who had ordered his servants not to attend to my needs. I felt uncomfortable confronting him as I was forced to do, knowing that our relations had become strained, but the Sultan had ordered me to stay in his home—a punishment, Abdullah told me, for Ibn Faleiha having advised the Sultan privately against one of his marriages, a marriage the Sultan had been determined to consummate, and which he had, despite his subject’s well-meaning, if ill-conceived, advice. History teaches us again and again how unwise it is to stand between one’s sovereign and a woman.
I tried once more to speak with Ibn Faleiha about the cost of my stay and told him that if we were in my own land I would have had the means to pay him for his hospitality, but that I had been robbed, held against my will, and ordered into his home. Indeed, if regular commerce existed between England and this land I would have sent him payment, but that was impossible. I again offered to perform whatever service he might ask of me in his house, but he appeared shamed by my words and, remembering his duties as host, ordered that I be given water, which I was shortly, in a tiny jug, with which I made do.
After washing, I dressed in my worn trousers, shirt, and jacket and in the early evening walked to the Sultan’s palace and was admitted and taken to a room in which the Sultan sat with three bearded advisors, one of whom handed me paper, pen, and ink and asked me to draw a map of the streets of London, not forgetting to mark the principal buildings, the palaces, the walls and fortifications, where they might stand. I began my task by drawing in the parks, which landmarks I use to orient myself in London, but the advisors stopped me to ask the purpose of the parks. They would not believe that they exist for beauty’s sake, to rest human eyes from the sight of stone, glass, and metal. They determined amongst themselves that the parks were maintained against a time of siege when the forests in them could be cut down for wood. I told them there was no wall around London, that the city is too vast for a wall, but they would not believe that any city could be greater in size or fortification than their own Agadez nor that the royal English capital would be unwalled. I, not wanting to insult them or try their patience, did not tell them that Agadez, with or without its wall, could fit comfortably inside the limits of Hyde Park.
For two hours they questioned me on the particulars of London, such as the location of the King’s Palace and the size of it, which again they would not believe, often asking me the same or similar questions a second or third time, as if to check the truth of my reports, to discover whether I varied in my telling. It began to seem as if they were gathering information from me with which to prepare an invasion of England, and despite my situation the entire exercise amused me greatly. I held back nothing and told the Sultan stories of the great buildings of London, of the ships docking there from around the world, and of the vast seas over which those ships had traveled. My stories amused the Sultan in turn, and he laughed many times, though his advisors regarded me gravely. When they were satisfied with my stories, or tired of them, one of the advisors carefully rolled up my map of London and tied it with leather straps. They all looked at me as if I had given them great and secret knowledge. I laughed inside myself to think that in their hearts they might hope one day to sack London, which suddenly, I realized, was the reason for their keeping me in Agadez: they feared the intimate knowledge of this city and their lands that I would carry out with me and the treacherous uses to which such knowledge might be put, knowledge no European—no Christian—before me had ever had. I began to wonder whether I would ever leave Agadez alive and thought that, to preserve my life against a time when I might escape, I should give them hints of further knowledge they might obtain from me, never imagining that they could put to practical use anything I might say. I began to talk of the seaward approaches to London and the course of the Thames and of that great city across the channel, Paris, a city richer than London, I told them, and from the whispers of the advisors and the looks of the Sultan I knew that I would not soon be put to death (if that were indeed their plan), but would, more likely, enjoy future dinners in their company.