Briefly I explained Ibn Faleiha’s plan for our escape. The eunuch and I arranged to be in daily contact through Abdullah so that I could apprise them of the time of our departure. The eunuch and Suleiyá would find a way for her to leave the Sultan’s palace and come to Ibn Faleiha’s when I sent word.
If the ship is repaired, we will fly you home to your England, she wrote on the paper.
I had little time to wonder at that. “Now you must hurry to the Sultan!” the eunuch said. “He will question your delay.”
But the Sultan seemed not to have noticed the few minutes I had spent with his wife and the eunuch. I drew for them a second map of my Utopia, adding many imaginary details.
We again ate at a late hour. This time, however, I did not become ill. As I prepared to take my leave, the Sultan looked long at me. “You have entertained me well,” he said. “I did not think a Christian capable of that.”
I wondered at those words as I walked home alone. They seemed odd to me, and I considered their implications. Suddenly I heard movement in the shadows against the building ahead, then low voices. A group of some ten men dressed in black robes stood waiting there, probably for me. I was unarmed and outnumbered. With a shout, I turned and ran back toward the palace and the assistance, I hoped, of its guards. But I found the doors barred. Though I knocked repeatedly, no one came for some time.
My assailants fell upon me and, despite my best efforts to fight, beat me with clubs till I thought I would surely die. I was knocked to the ground, where I held my head in my hands to try to protect it. The blow from one club broke the fingers of my left hand, but just as that happened, the doors opened and the guard rushed forth. My assailants scattered and ran away down dark streets, some pursued for a time by the guards. I was dragged inside, where the eunuch dressed my wounds. “You are lucky to be alive,” he said.
I wondered how long I would continue to be lucky. I remembered the Sultan’s strange words—portentous, they now seemed. The lack of guards outside the palace and their slow response meant that perhaps they had hoped I would be killed—the mahdi appeased, the Christian dead, the Sultan spared an order, somehow painful to him, for my execution.
I could walk. The guard escorted me to Ibn Faleiha’s, where Abdullah and others fussed over me till a late hour.
After a week I have healed enough to attend again to this journal. I wrote the entry for 27 May today, as if I had written it that night.
Two of my ribs are apparently broken, besides my fingers. Most of my body is still bruised and sore. But I am alive, healing, and, as the eunuch said, lucky. The mahdi has praised my attackers in sermons all this week.
Abdullah is just returned from the caravansary where today the son of Ibn Faleiha will finish conducting his business and depart Agadez, taking with him his mother and the servants of Ibn Faleiha, none of whom should evidently be missed for a time. By night, he will return for Ibn Faleiha and my party. The eunuch is to escort Suleiyá to meet us then, and we will all climb over the wall by cover of darkness and make our escape—the eunuch intending to accompany Ibn Faleiha to Bilma, as he fears he will be implicated in Suleiyá’s disappearance.
Abdullah tells me that the horses he and I will ride are fine animals, tan Arabians. “You must return these horses to my son,” Ibn Faleiha told me. “They are worth a great deal.” I do not doubt his words, and I promised to return the horses, God willing, after I had delivered Suleiyá to her people. I hope to be able to hold reins during the wild ride we will surely have to the Aïr mountains.
Ibn Faleiha is furious with me for having promised to help a Sultan’s wife escape certain death—“This Moon girl!” he called her. “This unholy creature whose presence in Agadez I opposed. You will be pursued. I can only think that, with this rash deed, you will draw the Sultan’s army after you and deliver us. For that, perhaps, I should thank you, and for that reason alone will I allow you to assist her.”
Abdullah refuses to go to Bilma and insists on accompanying me on this mad journey. I can only imagine what he will think when he sees Suleiyá’s face and, perhaps, wings.
I am sending these journals with Ibn Faleiha, since in our saddle bags is room for only food and water. Abdullah, Suleiyá, and I must travel lightly. My plan is to reach Bilma eventually, take up this journal, and write in it an account of all that befalls us in the coming days and of the wonders I might see.
The sun has just set. From my window, by the last dim light of day, I see the eunuch and a veiled woman approach this house. Abdullah and I risk much to protect this woman who is not human, and to solve her mystery.
Our plan is afoot. Soon all of us will have set off into a desert filled with brigands, pursued by a Sultan and his armies. Abdullah has spent much of the day in prayer.
I go now to join him.
The rest of the journal is blank. I found François Brissot sitting on the floor in the stacks, sorting papers from a cardboard box into neat piles. “Where did this come from?” I asked.
“From the archives of the mosque at Bilma,” he said. “When the government closed that city, the mosque’s records ended up here, just in time for the Nigerians to scatter them.”
“Have you read it?”
“Over the last six days, slowly, of course, and with my French/English dictionary nearby. I’d never done more than glance at the records from Bilma before now, and was surprised to find anything in English among them.”
“Were other journals or papers with it?”
“Only this, so far.” Brissot motioned vaguely at the boxes of papers and the stacks of books he had spent six months simply picking up from the floor. “Who knows what we will discover as we keep sorting and cataloging,” he said.
It was late. While Brissot locked up for the night, I reread Adams’s May 24 entry with its description of Suleiyá’s bracelets, thinking that I had seen something like them in Niamey, but I could not remember where. Brissot and I live in the same general direction, so we walked together for a time. I stopped Brissot on a street comer and pointed up at the night sky northeast of us. Niamey lies almost directly southwest of Agadez. You can’t see the Aïr mountains from there, but you can of course see the stars of that quadrant of sky.
“What would we find in the Aïr if we went looking?” I asked.
“God knows,” he said.
In my room that night, I opened my window to look at the stars. The breeze off the Sahara was hot and dry, as always. I thought of Robert Adams and his brave plan which had evidently not worked. He had never arrived in Bilma to take up writing again in his journal. But what had happened to him, Abdullah, and the “Moon girl”? Did the Sultan recapture them? Were they attacked by brigands? Had Suleiyá’s people left her—and what was she, after all? I had little hope that we would ever learn the answer to these questions. Some two hundred years later, how could we solve the mystery Robert Adams disappeared with?
I walked to the National Museum to study its displays of jewelry from the Sultanates, thinking that maybe here I had seen bracelets like the ones Adams described. But the oldest items on display from the Sultanate of Agadez were gold and silver necklaces dating from the 1850s. I asked the curator whether the displays were rotated, thinking that maybe other pieces were in storage now, not on display, but she assured me the museum’s holdings from the 1800s were small enough to be kept on permanent display. They rotated nothing out of the cases. I described the bracelets Suleiyá had worn, but the curator said they did not represent any Sahelian design she was aware of, past or present.