Libraries Beneath the Sand

When the words cease to come, I turn toward the delicate, water-stained manuscript that has sat framed on my writing desk, my muse for almost two decades. Centuries have aged the paper. The sepia-colored ink has bled in places.

I can see its author, quill in hand, laboriously creating lyrical Arabic. I imagine him hunched over a single candle in his desert home, recording a page of history; one page from the knowledge of the world, but a history important enough to be preserved. Eighteen years ago, this page and I traveled across half the Earth together, and we both have a story to tell.

~~

To us children of the 1950s, television was a magic portal to unknown worlds. I would wait with anticipation for the great travelogue shows that dominated the early airwaves: Seven League Boots, The Happy Wanderers, and I Search for Adventure. These shows helped me see that not everyone on this planet looked or talked as I did. Places such as Kathmandu, Marrakesh, and Ouagadougou were fantasy worlds for my young imagination, but it was Timbuktu that captured me.

In this, I was not alone. Like Atlantis and Shangri-La, Timbuktu has been a dream, a fantasy, a mirage of a story to lure unwary travelers to its grasp, the most remote place on Earth, so it was said, if it existed at all.

The siren call of Timbuktu lured explorers on years-long expeditions into the immense desert that today is the nation of Mali. In the nineteenth century, in the midst of continued colonial conquest, European men paid with their lives trying to prove Timbuktu’s existence. It was through their stories that Western Europe and North America came to know of the remote people who lived in that vast desert: the Imazighen — commonly called Tuaregs or Berbers — a tribe of fierce warriors, mostly Muslim, who have operated the trans-Saharan camel caravans for millennia. Their language was Tamasheq, but most spoke French, a holdover from colonial days, and many spoke English. Timbuktu was the southern terminus of their land in the largest hot desert on Earth, and it issued a beckoning voice to the ears of serious travelers.

Since my youth, the country of Mali has called to me. I dreamt of visiting that landlocked sea of sand and meeting those who lived there. In 2007, my dream ended, and reality took its place.

~~

There were no roads, only sand, and the vast emptiness reduced me to insignificance. I had never traveled to any place where the landscape moved so constantly.

Having no idea how to contact an Imohag — the singular of Imazighen — in the Sahara, I stumbled on a personal website that mentioned Halis al Moctar as a guide. He operated out of an internet café in Timbuktu, taking tourists on overnight jaunts within sight of the city wall. They would ride a camel, sleep in a nomad tent, and imagine themselves in another time and place. The following day, private drivers would take them back to the hotel happy hour. It was a popular weekend getaway for the ultrarich.

I told Halis I wanted to immerse myself in his culture. After countless questions, doubts, and explanations, we struck a deal. We were such an unlikely duo: a semi-nomadic man whose lifestyle echoes those of his ancestors 2,000 years ago, and a middle-aged white guy living in Los Angeles, looking for adventure. I took a chance with this stranger knowing there was a story waiting.

We met at the airport in the capital city of Bamako. Halis’s flowing blue robes billowed as he marched out to the tarmac, larger than life. He was imposing, well over six feet tall, and his tagelmoust, or turban wrap, added another foot to his stature. Like most Imazighen men, Halis had covered his face: They do so for modesty and to protect themselves from the elements, though some say the practice is also to prevent evil spirits from entering through the mouth. He had the face of a desert warrior and the voice of Mickey Mouse: Plus, he had the habit of giggling to end his sentences.

He scooped me up in a giant bear hug, and instinct was all I needed to know he was my guy. So there, on a broiling tarmac, we shook hands and agreed to ride together into his desert to meet and learn about his people. But my elation blinded me to the dangers that lie ahead.

~~

Western European awareness of Timbuktu brought with it the revelation of libraries that rivaled any on Earth. The golden era of the city was from the 14th through the 16th centuries, when kings, scholars, and holy men collected manuscripts carried by the merchant camel caravans. From this, a massive collection grew. It contained writings from throughout the African continent about Islam, medicine, astronomy, literature, poetry, and the history of the Imazighen. 

For centuries, this legacy of literature has faced extinction. In 1591, Morocco invaded Mali, intent on looting the libraries, so local people took books to their homes and buried them in the desert. It would not be the last time.

Eerie shadows danced along the walls as we entered. The room was filled with manuscripts and page-after-loose-page of ancient writings.

Centuries later, during French colonial rule of Mali from 1892 to 1960, the ancient Arabic and local languages of the libraries became increasingly difficult to interpret. Finally, in 1973, the Ahmed Baba Institute was founded with funding from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to organize and curate the collections, and, at the time of my visit, there were 60 separate libraries in the city containing more than 700,000 manuscripts.

~~

Our first stop was at the anthill-like port of Mopti, the destination of the Imazighen camel caravans. Halis and I sat on the waterfront watching stevedores load 200-pound slabs of salt onto barges that would send this precious commodity out into the world. Halis called for a young boy to bring us coffee, and I watched as slim white pelicans floated in the shallows. It was a calm, traveler’s kind of day.

Suddenly, out of nowhere came three men, swaggering more than walking, down the center of the street, coming our way as people stepped meekly aside. Their heads were swathed in white muslin, and their matching robes flowed freely to the ground. Their white sashes held long, curved daggers. Unlike the Imazighen, their faces were uncovered, and they all wore long beards. Their skin was dark, and they spoke loud enough to ensure all could hear them. Before I could say anything, Halis grabbed me, pushed me into a doorway, and stood behind me, his back to the street, shielding me as the three spirits passed by. 

“They are evil,” was all he would say.

~~

As nomads, the Imazighen are a people without a country, continually wandering through Mali, Niger, Libya, Algeria, and Burkina Faso. For them, moving is a way of life. They are a clan of the so-called Berber people, who have received many names over the years — from Tuareg (an Arabic term meaning “abandoned by God”) to “Blue Men” (reflected in the deep indigo of their garments) — but they prefer the name Imazighen, “free men.” For 2,000 years, they controlled the Trans-Saharan camel caravans that hauled salt, gold, and, at times, indentured servants from North Africa to Timbuktu.

Their freedom was severely harmed by the French colonization of Mali in 1892. Under French rule, other ethnic groups were favored over Imazighen. Since those days, there have been numerous periodic Imazighen revolts against the Malian government, especially after gaining independence from France in 1960. By the early 1980s, Imazighen had been fleeing Mali to join forces with Moammar Gadhafi of Libya and were rewarded with large sums of cash, military training, and modern weaponry.

From 1990-96, an Imazighen rebellion agitated for greater autonomy in northern Mali. A few quiet years followed until 2006, when Imazighen clans openly clashed with the Malian military.

By this time, a group of fundamentalists calling themselves Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb had taken hold in Mali’s desolate northeast desert. I arrived in 2007, woefully ignorant of this growing threat.

~~

While the desert was his world, Halis knew of what lay beyond it thanks to his international clientele. He was conversant in several languages and had the manners of what he referred to as one high-born — a point he repeatedly made to me. He drove at top speed in both the city and the countryside with a reassuring nonchalance. His driving never slowed, nor did his talking. I sat quietly, taking him in.

He told me of Imazighen customs and beliefs. I learned how young boys serve an apprenticeship with the caravans, doing menial tasks while learning how to navigate not only by the sun and stars but also by the shifting sands and smells carried on the wind. And there was a lot of wind, including the Harmattan, a seasonal, cold wind that blows east to west, churning the sand into storms that can bury a man in minutes. In the summer, when it combines with cooler southwest monsoon winds over the Atlantic, it can cause tornadoes to form over West Africa. It also acts as a filter, sheltering travelers from the blazing sun, keeping temperatures bearable.

Timbuktu has been a dream, a fantasy, a mirage of a story to lure unwary travelers to its grasp, the most remote place on Earth, so it was said, if it existed at all.

Halis seemed to navigate by an inner compass. When I asked how he found his way in such a barren place, he would point to a stunted tree or large rock and say, “Here I had spaghetti with my brother,” or “There my first camel went lame.”

He told me that one day his father’s camel died far from camp. While his father was gutting the animal for meat to sustain him on the long walk, a monstrous sandstorm enveloped them. Halis’s father crawled inside the carcass to safely ride out the storm.

Halis explained how man and camel are one in the desert, existing in a symbiotic relationship only a nomad could understand. An Imohag’s camel is his family, and he will die for it. “When I am with my camel, I am never lost,” he told me.

~~

We reached Timbuktu in a haze of sand, and it was what I had always pictured it to be: a low, flat, brown city made of adobe. Should it be abandoned for only a few days, the Harmattan would claim its entirety.

Satellite dishes and television antennas sprouted on flat mud rooftops while cheap and noisy Chinese motorbikes dodged donkeys and camels on the sandy streets. The aroma of fresh bread came from clay street ovens, and schoolchildren sat in the street, huddled by a wall, writing their lessons on worn wooden tablets that had been passed down through generations. I saw what looked like ink made from ash and water, and feather pens that could be rinsed for use the next day. While I was there, three great madrassas, or Islamic learning centers, still existed; the call to prayer was an audio tape set to play on a timer. When it did, few people seemed to respond.

I visited the former homes of early explorers René Caillié and Alexander Gordon Laing. In his exploration of the Niger River basin, Laing was attacked by Imazighen in the Sahara Desert. Though severely wounded, he made it to Timbuktu — the first European to do so. Two days after leaving the city, he was killed.  

More than anything, I wanted to visit the soul of Timbuktu — its libraries. I wanted to walk down rows of handmade books, to be surrounded by thousands of years of human knowledge.

At the time of my visit, there were sixty separate libraries in the city containing more than 700,000 manuscripts.

Standing before one of the libraries, I took in the main entrance, where grand old wooden doors with hammered tin inlays stood as sentinels. Inside, row after row of glass cases were neatly lined up but filled with manuscripts and loose pages in various degrees of disintegration. Despite the sweltering heat, there was no air conditioning or climate control. There were no locks on the display cases.

But it was in the annex where I felt my heart stop.

Surrounding me in the darkened room, hundreds of manuscripts, bound and unbound, were stacked flat on each other like columns. Some were in glass cases, but even those were filled with sand. In every corner of the room, small dunes had formed. There were only two glass windows; the others were just empty squares open to both the elements and thieves. Even one page from one of these precious relics could bring a high price on the black market, and they were loose on tables, piled in chairs, some even lying on the sand floor.

I had stepped back in time. In my mind, I could picture a man at a wooden desk in the corner wearing an aging djellaba with the hood pulled over his head. He was hunched by a candle, writing intently. As I approached to look over his shoulder, I saw the lyrical cursive Arabic clear and fresh as it was six centuries ago.

Back in the present, the caretaker handed me a large volume that I hesitated to hold. I dared not turn a page for fear it would crumble; it was so fragile. I was stunned. Halis sensed my trepidation, and putting his arm around me, said that we would talk on our drive to his village. As we left, I noticed four young men putting manuscripts into boxes and wrapping them with plastic.

~~

Halis took me to his home and continued my indoctrination into his world. He dressed me in his own blue robes and showed me how to wrap the tagelmoust around my head. Dressed as an Imohag, only my eyes, hands, and feet were visible, both burned a deep brown from the sun. Halis would do the talking while I traveled by his side. I wondered how this white Christian would be accepted by these Islamic nomads and how they would respond to what I feared might be an appropriation of their culture. Many doubts surfaced as I came face-to-face with the enormity of what I was doing. Should I be exposed as an imposter, my life would be at risk.

I then took my first steps as an Imohag into the streets of Timbuktu as people nodded in our direction, some of them giving a slight bow as a gesture of respect.

The next morning, we left at sunrise in Halis’s Land Rover, filled with supplies and gifts of tea, coffee, and honey for those we would meet along the way. We would head north to Araouane, into a 3.5 million-square-mile wilderness.

Hour after hour we passed ever-changing dunes that seemed to me were being sculpted in real time by the hand of God. We passed several small caravans, all heavily laden, all heading north as we were. I wondered about their sheer numbers and fell asleep listening to Halis talk, a sense of peace enveloping me.

~~

In the late afternoon, we stopped under a stunted tree that had simply refused to die. I laid prone to act as a windbreak while Halis made fire with flint and steel. Within a minute, I had to move or become buried under a berm. Halis brewed sweet tea, and I learned that for Imazighen, like the British, nothing happens until after a proper tea, and Halis likes his several times a day.

As we leaned against his Land Rover, Halis told me of the white-clad men in Mopti. He told me they wanted an Islamic state ruled by sharia law, and their numbers were growing daily. Because their base of operations was in such a remote and hostile area, the world paid little attention at the time, but eventually, brother might be pitted against brother in the desert. Halis sensed the beginning of a storm.

Halis told me that should these men take control, the first thing they would do is destroy the most sacred Sufi shrines in Timbuktu. Then, they would attack thousands of years of human learning. To them, knowledge was blasphemy, and images in books were heresy.

I imagine him hunched over a single candle in his desert home, recording a page of history; one page from the knowledge of the world, but a history important enough to be preserved.

Tragically, the collection of manuscripts at risk was so vast that it could not all be moved. Unbeknownst to me, there was already a growing international effort sending archivists and specialists in hopes of digitizing as much as possible before fanatics or nature itself claimed the texts forever. Local scholars were brought in to determine the most valuable and oldest manuscripts.

There were also budding efforts to disperse much of the libraries’ collections to safe locations until their return could be assured, a monumental and unprecedented task. Halis told me that some texts from the library we’d visited were being moved to Araouane, our immediate destination and home of his family. Several boxes were loaded into his Land Rover for our journey together.

I was suddenly part of a benevolent smuggling operation. Wrapped in emotions, I entered a state of sensory overload as we continued north into the desert. There were no roads, only sand, and the vast emptiness reduced me to insignificance. I had never traveled to any place where the landscape moved so constantly, and I felt myself a true explorer at the edge of the known world.

~~

Many hours later, we crested one final dune, and the ancient village of Araouane was before us: a scattering of low adobe buildings that the blowing sand buried one day and uncovered the next. There was a camel remuda that I could smell from a mile away, tended by Imazighen boys. Several curious women, all unveiled, gathered to observe this rare and strange visitor.

Older than Timbuktu, Araouane had known many proprietors, including an American entrepreneur who opened a hotel and restaurant hoping to lure the Hollywood elite to such an “exotic” location. That idea died a quick and merciful death. There was a small mosque whose interior was vacant. Araouane held the final well, drilled by the United Nations Development Programme, before the last leg of the journey to Timbuktu, and so it was a permanent stop on the caravans’ routes south. 

I was received with open arms by Halis’s family, who seemed honored that I would like to enter their world. That evening, I sat in the sand, part of a circle of men as young women served us from a large cauldron of rice and seared goat, which we ate with our right hands, as Islamic law dictates. Afterward, I was honored to sit with Halis’s father as he told me stories and showed me his tattoos, which he told me signified battles fought and enemies vanquished. He was a true desert warrior.

~~

After dinner, I followed Halis and his father to a building lit by an aging kerosene lamp. Eerie shadows danced along the walls as we entered. The room was filled with manuscripts and page after loose page of ancient writings. Scorpions scurried under our feet, and a giant spider held watch from one ceiling corner.

Halis had been stockpiling manuscripts for some time. Men, women, and children were all bringing manuscripts from Timbuktu to Araouane, where they would be wrapped in oilcloth and plastic to be distributed to families across the southern Sahel. The collection was being dispersed across hundreds of families, many of them nomadic, making it impossible for the rebels that would become Al-Qaida to track it down to destroy it.

I spent the rest of that evening and the following day wrapping manuscripts and loading camels.

~~

Over the next few days, two of Halis’s nephews rode with us on heavily laden camels as we rode in a wide, arcing circle, visiting numerous nomad camps before arriving back in Timbuktu. At each stop, Halis would visit old friends, and each family would take a few books or pages to be hidden — often buried — in places only the local people would know.

In that moment, this undertaking did not strike me as anything momentous, but in time, I would realize that I had witnessed, and in a small way helped, a remarkable effort to save some of the world’s greatest literature. Countless volumes of human thought and accomplishment were being spread across the desert in the very land that helped to produce it, and only a handful of people would know it was happening.

~~

The world paid little attention at the time, but eventually, brother might be pitted against brother in the desert.

A year after my visit, in 2008, Imazighen separatists deployed landmines and attacked a Malian army outpost. They were defeated.

But by 2010, the Arab Spring swept across the Middle East, begun by the ejection of Tunisian president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. In 2011, Gadhafi was killed, and hundreds of Imazighen returned home from Libya. Heavily armed and backed by Islamic militants, they demanded an independent state to be called Azawad. 

Their state was never realized. That same year, Ansar al-Dine (defenders of the faith), an affiliate of Al-Qaida in the Maghreb, made its world debut. After much back-and-forth and shifting alliances, by the summer of 2012, Timbuktu fell to Ansar al-Dine and Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, who imposed sharia law.

The first consequential act was the destruction of the most sacred Sufi shrines in the city and the looting of the libraries.

In 2013, French peacekeeping forces recaptured Timbuktu, but any semblance of peace was short-lived. Islamic militant groups continued to attack French and Malian forces. By this point, I had lost touch with any of my contacts that remained, including Halis. I have no idea how much of the library collection was destroyed — or saved.

~~

In 2007, on our final day together, Halis presented me with a heavy silver medallion that he called a “passport.” It was inscribed in Tamasheq and said I was from the village of Araouane and that all necessary assistance should be rendered to me if required. That was the law of the desert, be you friend or foe.

He then handed me a small package wrapped in newspaper. Inside was a page from the library collection. It was written in sepia-colored ink and carried watermarks. On one side, it carried the image of a building wall, and on the reverse, it held instructions for the decoration of a mosque. My initial reaction was to say “no.” To me, acceptance of the page was tantamount to looting, but coming from the hand of the man who had done the most to save it, I relented.

“It will be safe with you, “ Halis insisted, “and it will be your reason to return it here one day.”

He scooped me up in a giant bear hug, and instinct was all I needed to know he was my guy.

My final word from Halis came as an email from a refugee camp in Burkina Faso, which received roughly 20,000 Malian refugees beginning in 2012. He said he was well and hoped to return to Timbuktu. After that, the Russian mercenary Wagner Group joined the fighting in that part of the Sahara at the request of the Malian government, and my communications ceased.

For now, I must trust in prayer that my friends are alive and safe, and that the libraries have at least partially survived. Should they remain buried in this sea of sand for centuries, at least they’ll still exist.

~~

The manuscript page still occupies its frame on my desk. Eighteen years have passed since it was entrusted to me. I am older and am unlikely to return to Timbuktu. The page I possess — like many others that have been scattered in the name of preservation — is also unlikely to return.

In recent years, many of the manuscripts have found residence online, digitized by scholars so they might live on. As wonderful as this effort is, it cannot fully do justice to the history of these manuscripts or the people who safeguarded them for so long. These artifacts belong in the desert, where the sand cradled them for millennia. They belong in the libraries that arose from the Sahara itself — the libraries whose existence was carried in legends, like the tempests of the Harmattan winds, across the continent and the sea.

So, like Halis, I still carry the dream of returning one day. I can see us in the Land Rover, Halis driving, the manuscript page on its way to join the other recovered pages of history — coming home at last.