Caravan Read online

  He smiled; his teeth were dazzling white against his dark skin, but he did not answer. "Come, there is more to see, and another story."

  His next story was about the Jam'al Kharruba, which he said meant the Mosque of the Carob Tree. "Named for a tree?" I said disbelievingly.

  "Yes, little Bowman, a most significant tree." It had been built, he said, following a great plague in the city long ago, when the poor devils infected had been banished outside the city walls to die. No food was given them, and they had to eat what they could find, and what they ate were the fleshy pods of a great carob tree growing wild beyond the gates. And the carob cured them, and they did not die. And because of this, out of gratitude, the mosque was built where the old carob tree had stood.

  "Yes," I said smiling at him, "but you've still not told me how it is that you speak English in Tripoli, where so few do."

  He only laughed.

  I grew even more curious when this rough but kind man guided me to the Arch of Marcus Aurelius. Looking at it 1 said cautiously, "I hear it's terribly old."

  Mohammed smiled a little and closing his eyes said, much to my surprise, "Whatever may happen to you, it was prepared for you from all eternity, and the implication of causes was from eternity spinning the thread of your being."

  That sounded spooky, and under my wrappings I scowled. "You made that up? It sounds like Grams."

  "Grams?" He turned and looked at me. "Those be the words of Marcus Aurelius."

  "Oh," I said.

  "You do not know of him?"

  I shook my head. "Is he like Omar Khayyam?"

  "Ah—not so ignorant after all," he said, regarding me with a smile.

  "Ignorant!" I sputtered, insulted.

  But he only laughed.

  I did not see him every day, for Friday was his holy day, the yawn al-jum'a, the day of gathering together, he said, and Sunday was the Christian Sabbath. On our walks together he was a popular man, too, and the Arab greetings were time-consuming, making me impatient and angry until I learned some of the words myself.

  A bearded man would stop, seeing him. "Ya, Mohammed!"

  "Alaaaan, " Mohammed would say.

  "Ahlan wa sahlan. Kaif haluk, bahi, " would exclaim his friend.

  And so it would go: How are things? Fine, how are you doing? Very well, thank God .., until at last, Peace be with you, adieu (the adieu, I felt, would interest Jacob) and we could go on, with me following a step behind him like a proper Muslim woman, but when 1 asked Mohammed indignantly if he'd cloaked me in a barracan to save himself the embarrassment of walking beside me, he only smiled. I loved these mornings spent with him, when for an hour at a time we might watch the sponge divers make their precarious descents underwater, or we would stop at a suk to watch a boy fashion pottery, or a man carving ivory. At every call of the muezzin Mohammed would join the others in the tashah-hud, their profession of faith, while I waited in the shadows, watching, and each day after combing the city on foot he would return me formally in an araba to the Consulate. I would remove my barracan and step out, thanking him with a conspiratorial grin, and enter the door in my Western clothes. I was being educated but not precisely as Jacob had expected, of this I was sure.

  And at night I would go alone to the rooftop of the Consulate and look up at the deep velvety sky and see more stars than I'd ever seen in my life, and feel the enchantment of the city enter my heart. It was because of Mohammed that it became forever engraved there.

  And each day I would ask Mohammed, "How is it that you speak English like this?"

  One day he said, "Come, 1 show you something."

  This time we took an araba to the waterfront, and dismissing it walked through a labyrinth of alleys until he stopped beside a small door. Turning to me he said, "This is my home."

  I was deeply touched that he was about to allow me into his own life, which I felt the highest compliment he could give me. He opened the door and we strolled into a courtyard, open to the sky but with brilliant passionflowers overhead that filtered out the sun like a lattice and splashed the floor with shadows. Leading me across the courtyard we entered a room so dim that I was at first blinded, but as my eyes adjusted to the change in light I saw that it was filled with leather cushions and low tables. At one of them sat a plump, middle-aged Arab woman with sewing in her lap. He spoke to her in Arabic, she nodded and went out, giving me a curious but friendly glance. Gesturing to a mound of pillows for me to sit on, we waited in a silence that was interrupted by the woman bringing in a tray with tiny cups of coffee.

  "This is my wife Asma," he told me, and gestured to her to join us. I nodded politely and when she smiled I smiled, too.

  "Now I will show you something," he said, and rising he brought from a corner of the room a small packet wrapped in exquisite silk. From it he drew out two books, very worn, their pages curled as if they'd been drowned and then dried under a hot sun. He placed them in my hands. They were a small Bible—in English—and Marcus Aurelius's Meditations.

  "You learned English from these two books?" I said in astonishment.

  He shook his head. "These books were in my pocket when I was found in the sea, half-dead and clutching a plank of charred wood that only a little made me float. I was brought ashore and nursed back to life by her family."

  He nodded toward his wife. "When it happened I was no older than you, little Bowman."

  "But—then you're not Arab or Turkish at all," I stammered. "You may even be English!"

  He shrugged. "I remember nothing even to this day. All I know is that English was the only language I could speak. Everything else was knocked from my head. Everything," he added firmly.

  He said that last word too quickly, so that I knew this wasn't true but that I would hear no more.

  I said, "And the consul learned this?"

  He smiled. "A clever man, the consul, yes a clever man. I deal in esparto—the wild grasses of the desert sent to Europe for paper-making—and one day he and the vice-consul had come to watch the esparto baled for shipping. In my presence he spoke of business matters to his companion—in English, you understand, and hearing his words 1 explained the matter to him more clearly—in Arabic, you understand, but"—he smiled faintly—"what an expression on his face! Later he sent for me and said, 'You understood our English!" So I told him. He is the only European to know."

  "And now I know."

  "And now you know, little Bowman. You have asked and you have asked, and now you know how I come to speak English."

  I said softly, "And for this I thank you, Mohammed."

  He nodded, and rising easily to his feet from the floor, said, "Come, you have not yet seen the desert, and next week you learn the camels. You have completed the coffee? I have shown you the Mosque of Sidi Hammuda, the Jam'a an-Naqa, the Jam'a Gurgi, the markets, the castle and the suks. Before I return you for your Sabbath tomorrow it is time you see the desert."

  For this trip we rode again in an araba, with its tiny bells jingling merrily, but this time to the fringe of the city where we made our way on foot through narrow lanes where the sand lay a foot deep and the mud walls confined us on either side. At last we reached the final wall, met with a few palm trees and then abruptly all trace of the city ended; we stood at the edge of such space as I had seen only once before, on our long voyage across the sea. The earth stretched out flat and tawny—into infinity, surely—until it met and became one with a yellowing sunset sky. At my feet the ground was dusted here and there with bleached dried grasses, but not one of them was high enough to quiver in the wind that I felt upon my face, full of freshness after the heat and smells of the city. Far away I could see a line of dark shapes moving across the scrub, camels or goats, but otherwise there was only the spellbinding silence and a vast emptiness.

  Mohammed, watching me, said, "Well?"

  I drew a deep breath and nodded. "Yes," I said.

  "You will travel many days by camel to reach Ghadames."

  I felt no sense of forebod
ing. I was only sixteen, after all, and on Monday I would learn to ride a camel. I made no reply, and after a few minutes we left and I was returned to the Consulate.

  5

  I had always assumed, and my geography class at Thistlethwaite had done nothing to dispel this, that a desert was made entirely of sand, but Mohammed laughed at that. "There is not so much of it as people think, little Bowman," he said. "The great sand hills are called ergs, but there are many miles of gravel-wastes, or regs, and in the Sahara tall mountains of stone."

  In my geography class I had also been given the impression that camels go for weeks without water, but Mohammed told me this was exaggeration; I had also assumed camels were fast and covered many miles a day, but Mohammed only smiled at my naiveté, saying the best speed of a riding camel was four or five miles an hour, and that of pack animals even slower, and yes there were tales of camels covering incredible distances in a brief time, but no one added that on the next day such camels often lay down and died of exhaustion. I then announced that I'd heard camels made people seasick, whereupon he assured me that this too was rare, it was more likely I'd be rocked to sleep, which was far worse and more dangerous, so that altogether I was being stripped of all my conceptions and left curious as to what the truth of it might be.

  Since Mohammed was a prosperous esparto merchant he owned his own camels, two of which he had selected for my Camel Day. These were waiting for us outside the city walls as well as half a dozen ragged, cheerful boys. Jacob did not join us, indeed he seemed at this time a man demented; his letter to the Grande Pórtale in Constantinople, applying for a passport, or furman as it was called, had still not arrived to give us permission to travel, and now, besides making arrangements to leave, there were desperate visits to the Pasha at the castle to persuade him to issue the furman instead. Jacob had come too far to be balked; I'd not realized the importance of this trip for him, or his stubbornness, either. I guessed that the paper he planned for his Society was to be a culmination, a crowning glory, his entry into the world as adventurer and globe traveler, but he had not confided his dreams to me, in fact I saw so little of him that I wondered often why he had married me.

  The camel I was given to ride on this day was a sand-colored mare and I had looked forward to making friends with her, much as one did a horse, but this too was a mistake as I immediately learned. When I approached her, lifting an arm to stroke her long throat, Mohammed shouted, "NO!" and I stopped, confused. The camel glanced down at me from a vast distance, bared her huge yellow teeth and with a look of contempt spat a stream of saliva at me. This camel was therefore not a horse, and was only to be ridden, but she was also very high and I was very small beside her. With shouts and sticks the boys prodded the camel into a crouch, I was inserted upon what felt a very unsteady wooden saddle, the camel was prodded to her feet and I fell forward; she gave a great tired sigh as she reached a standing position and I fell back, desperately clutching the saddle horn.

  Off we went, a boy walking beside my camel with a lead rope. I assumed this was to prevent the creature from running away, which seemed inconceivable because her pace was so slow. Even this assumption was an error: each time we passed a few blades of grass or thorns we came to a halt, the camel lowered her head to examine and then eat, at which point I once again came near to sliding over her head to the ground. Transferring the greenery to her great maw of a mouth, she would chew, belch, bray pitifully, while I slid back again on the saddle. I began to understand that a camel was a very eccentric animal and I could not understand why nomads sang love songs to them.

  We did not ride far on this first lesson, for after a few minutes Mohammed called out, "Gibleh!" and pointed to the horizon, which was becoming blurred by a yellow cloud. "Back—yuafî" he shouted, and with much prodding turned his camel around. Having no idea what a "gibleh" might be, I experienced a sense of alarm made greater by the stubbornness of my camel, which was talked to, shouted at, prodded and thumped until, much against her will, she too was turned around. The sky was still vividly blue but the heat seemed to have gained weight and intensity and the wind was rising, bringing with it skittish swirls of sand and dust so that by the time we reached our starting point my lips were gritty with sand that stung my eyes and clogged my nostrils, and Mohammed's face had become a white mask.

  "What," I demanded crossly, "is a gibleh?"

  "The wind blowing north out of the desert," he told me. "It lasts until the wind changes. How did you like your ride?"

  "I will do better tomorrow, you'll see," I promised him.

  He said carelessly, "Someone else will teach you tomorrow."

  Startled, I said, "What do you mean?"

  He turned, giving instructions to the boys in Arabic, and they led the camels away. Mohammed and I walked to the pair of donkeys on which we'd ridden out of the city; they waited among the palms, tied to a tree in the lee of the wind blowing in from the desert, and as I untied mine I said, "What did you mean, Mohammed, someone else tomorrow?"

  He gazed at me soberly over the shoulder of his donkey. "I must leave tomorrow—on your Sabbath—to go to Misurata, little Bowman."

  Stunned I said, "Oh, Mohammed, truly?"

  He nodded. "It is for the sake of my business I abandon you, it cannot wait longer."

  I looked at him in dismay. "But I'll see you when you get back, won't I? Is Misurata far? Jacob is hopeful about a furman in a few days, but even so the consul insists we wait and join a caravan from Benghazi that's not expected for a few weeks. Will you be gone that long?"

  His smile was wry. "He will get his furman, but I do not think your husband a man to patiently wait for any caravan, little Bowman."

  "But—but I will miss you," I stammered, and then as I realized what he'd said my cheeks flamed. "Oh Mohammed, I'm sorry. I didn't think at all about the business you left to be my guide. Did the consul force you?"

  He shook his head. He said gravely, "You know I study Marcus Aurelius very much, little Bowman. He has written 'the universal cause is like a winter torrent carrying everything along with it.' I have thought on his Meditations much, and on doing what is woven into the thread of one's destiny." He said simply, "It was my duty to show you my city."

  I stared at this man who for so many years had lived his life in the company of an Arab wife and Marcus Aurelius.

  "But I am also an honest man," he added with a sudden smile, "and I wanted to be your guide, for if I am English—if I should be English—I might have had a daughter just like you."

  I was deeply touched by this. "Oh I would have liked that very much," I told him warmly. "You've been so kind to me, Mohammed."

  He nodded. "I will be kind even more and say something else, little Bowman. It is well that your husband has chosen Edrasi as leader of your caravan, but I hear he also chooses Umar as guide for your journey."

  "Yes, do you know him?"

  He shrugged. "A good guide, Umar, but there have been rumore lately in the suks, little Bowman, such as the consul may not have heard. If you have influence—"

  "What rumors, Mohammed?"

  "You think 1 wish a knife in my back some dark night? There are whispers of greed, of his being too friendly with—but I say no more. If you have influence—"

  He stopped, and although I pressed him he would not say more, but I did not like the sound of this.

  We mounted the donkeys—such amiable creatures after my spitting hostile camel-—and plodded through the sand-filled lanes until we reached the streets of the city, and then the Consulate. Dismounting at the doorway Mohammed said, "I have something for you, little Bowman."

  It was a Hand of Fatima, carved of solid silver, and small enough to fit into the palm of my hand; this shape hung over every house and suk in Tripoli as protection against evil. His gift brought tears to my eyes. "It's beautiful, Mohammed, thank you," and with a wry smile I added, "Does Marcus Aurelius have anything to say about good-byes?"

  There was an appreciative twinkle in his eye. "He has
written 'how ridiculous and how strange to be surprised at anything that happens in life!' "

  "Well," I said stubbornly, "I shall still hope to see you again."

  "That," he said, "rests in the hands of both our Gods." He bowed to me, touching his hand to his lips and to his forehead, the traditional mark of respect; I did the same, although I would have preferred to hug him. Grasping the lead ropes of the two donkeys he led them down the street; I watched until he turned into an alleyway—he did not look back—and vanished from my sight.

  His words remained with me, however, for I trusted Mohammed, and I felt much unease, not knowing what he had meant about this Umar, so highly recommended by the consul. I determined to learn something of Jacob's decisions and plans.

  The gibleh blew all that night and the next day, a hot and sickly wind, very strong and so dry that it was hard to swallow food, which in any case held the grit of fine sand, no matter how carefully protected in the kitchen, for the wind and the dust crept in through the walls and deposited a film of white on steamer trunks, bedding, crates, tables, chairs and floor. Held captive by the persistent gibleh I dreaded the next weeks without Mohammed's company, for everyone at the Consulate had work to do and Jacob spent long hours going over and over the supplies for our journey, checking and rechecking them and not at all inclined to talk. I expressed my feelings to Mr. Jappy but unfortunately his painted smile was fixed upon his wooden head and he could give no counsel. I practiced the words of Arabic and Turkish that I'd learned from Mohammed; I wrote a long letter to Belle Stanhope, and was infinitely relieved when, after two days, the wind ceased its savagery from the south and we were restored to the glorious breezes from the Mediterranean.

  It was on this same day that the Pasha in Tripoli took it upon himself to issue the furman to Jacob, no doubt to be rid of his tiresome daily visits, and it was that evening that I saw Jacob, the vice-consul and a lean man in turban and barracan walk into one of the rooms off the courtyard and close the door behind them.

  I opened the door and walked in.