As I walked, the sun rose over the hills, which I knew meant that I was in Africa. This realization was simple but frightening. We have all been lost, but it is rare that we do not know on which continent’s sandy shore we wander. I did not speak the language nor did I know the land as I did Arabia. Yet something emboldened me, perhaps youth, perhaps the delirium of the sun.
I had not walked one hour when I reached a turn in the coastline where a sliver of the sea sliced into the shore. I tasted the water. It was still salty, yet beside me lay a single thin branch, which had been washed downstream, and on it, a single leaf, dry and shaking in the wind. My travels and trading had taught me a little about plants, for when we anchored in Fareez and Gomaina, we traded for herbs with the nomads there. And this little leaf I recognized as the plant we call belaidour, and Berbers call adil-ououchchn, whose tea brings the drinker dreams of the future, and whose berries make women’s eyes wide and dark. Yet at that moment I thought little of the preparation of tea and much of botany. For belaidour is expensive because it does not grow along the Red Sea, but in wooded mountains many miles west. This gave me the faint hope that man had once been here, and if man then perhaps water.
So with this hope alone, I turned inland, following the sliver of sea south, with the prayer that I would find the source of the belaidour, and with it the water that nourished those who traded it.
I walked for the remainder of the day, and into the night. I still remember the arc of the moon as it passed through the sky. It wasn’t half full, but the cloudless sky gave no shelter from the light that cast itself over the water and sand. What I don’t remember is that sometime during the night I lay down to rest, and I fell asleep.
I awoke to the gentle prodding of a goatherd’s staff and opened my eyes to see two young boys, wearing only loincloths and necklaces. One of them crouched in front of me, staring with a quizzical gaze. The other, who looked younger, stood behind him, watching over his shoulder. We stayed like this for the duration of many breaths, neither of us moving, watching only, he squatting, holding his knees, looking curiously, defiantly into my eyes. Slowly I rose to a sitting position, never dropping my gaze. I raised my hand and greeted him in my own tongue.
The boy didn’t move. Briefly his eyes left my face and jumped to my hand, stared at it, and looked back at my face. The boy behind him said something in a language that I didn’t understand, and the older one nodded, still not dropping his gaze. He raised his free hand behind him, and the younger boy unstrapped a leather canteen from his shoulders and placed it in the raised hand. The older boy untied a thin lace from the mouth of the bag and handed it to me. I raised the bag to my lips, closed my eyes, and began to drink.
I was so thirsty I could have emptied the bag ten times over. But the heat bid temperance; I did not know where the water had come from, nor how much remained. Finished drinking, I lowered the bag and handed it back to the older boy, who tied it without looking, his fingers winding the leather lace. He stood up and spoke to me in a loud voice, and although the language was foreign, the commanding tone of a child faced with responsibility is universal. I waited. He spoke again, louder this time. I pointed to my mouth and shook my head, as today I point to my ears. For then I was not yet deaf. That story is yet to come.
Beside me, the boy spoke again, loud and sharply, as if frustrated. He stamped his staff on the ground. I waited a moment and then rose slowly, to show I did so out of my own will and not for all his shouting. I would not let myself be commanded by a boy.
Once I had risen, I had my first chance to examine the landscape around us. I had fallen asleep by water, and no further than thirty paces ahead I could see where a little brook bubbled into the estuary, casting reflected currents across the pebbles. At its mouth, a scattering of pale plants clung to the rocks. I stopped at the brook to drink. The boys waited and said nothing, and soon we continued, up a bluff where a pair of goats gnawed at the grasses. The boys prodded them along, and we followed a dry streambed that must have fed the river in the rains.
It was morning, but already hot, and canyon walls rose on either side of the sandy path, intensifying both the heat and the sound of our steps. The boys’ voices echoed as they chattered to the goats, strange sounds that I recall vividly. Now that I am old, I wonder if this was due to any physical property of the canyon, or because in less than two days I would no longer hear.
We followed the canyon for several miles, until at a bend identical to hundreds we had passed in our route the goats scampered instinctively up a steep trail. The boys followed nimbly, their sandals finding impossible toeholds in the sandy wall. I tried my best to keep up, but slipped, skinning my knee before finding a solid grip and pulling myself up the trail they had so delicately trod. At the top I remember stopping to inspect my leg. It was a small, superficial wound and would dry immediately in the heat. And yet I remember this action, not for itself but for what followed. For when I looked up, the boys were running down a broad slope, chasing the goats. Below them stretched one of the most stunning visions I have ever seen. Indeed, had I been struck with blindness, rather than deafness, I think I would have been content. For nothing, not even the pounding surf of Babelmandeb, could match the scene that stretched out before me, the slope descending, flattening into a vast desert plain that stretched into a horizon blurred with sandstorms. And out of the thick dust, whose silence belied the rage known to anyone who has ever been caught in the terror of one of the storms, marched legions of caravans, from every point on the compass, long, dark trails of horses and camels, all emerging from the blur that swept across the valley, and all converging on a tent encampment that lay at the base of the hill.
There must have been hundreds of tents already, perhaps thousands if approaching caravans could be counted. From my perch on top of the mountain, I gazed out over the tents. A number of the styles I recognized. The peaked white tents of the Borobodo people, who often came to the ports at which we called to trade camel skins. The broad flat tents of the Yus, a warrior tribe who haunted the southern reaches of the Sinai, famous among the Egyptians for raids on traders, so fierce that ships would often not drop anchor if the tents were sighted onshore. The Rebez, an Arabian race, who dug holes in the sand before laying skins as a roof and setting a long pole at the thresholds of their homes, which serves as a beacon should shifting sands bury a home and its inhabitants. Beyond these, however, most of the structures were foreign to me, suggesting perhaps that their people came from deeper in the African interior.
I heard a piercing whistle from down the hill. Halfway between me and the tent city, the older boy was shouting and waving his staff. I ran and soon I reached the boys, and we descended the remainder of the hill together. We passed another group of boys playing with rocks and sticks, and my friends called out to them in greeting. I noticed they held their heads high, and pointed frequently to me. I was, I imagine, an impressive find.
We passed the first tents, where camels were tethered outside. I could see firelight through their entrances, but no one came out to greet us. Then more tents, and as I followed my guides to a mysterious end, the paths between tents began to bustle with more activity. I passed hooded nomads whose faces I couldn’t discern, dark Africans bedecked with fine furs, veiled women who stared at me and dropped their eyes quickly when our gazes met. In such a gathering, I caused little sensation. Twice I passed men I heard speaking Arabic, but both my shame at my dishevelment and the haste of the boys kept me from stopping. We passed several campfires, where silhouetted musicians played songs I did not recognize. The boys stopped briefly at one, and I could hear the older one whisper the words as they watched the singers. Then we turned and plunged back into alleyways of tent and sand. At last we reached a large circular tent with a flat, slightly pointed roof and an open hole in the center from which wisps of smoke followed the glow of the fire into the darkening sky. The boys tied the goats to a post outside the tent, next to a pair of camels. They lifted the tent flap and motioned me inside.