Anatomy of Restlessness Read Online Free PDF Page B

visitor there are only two questions. ‘Where is my next drink coming from?’ and ‘Why am I here at all?’ And yet, as I write, I remember the desert wind whipping up the green waters; the thin hard blue of the sky; enormous women rolling round the town in pale indigo cotton boubous ; the shutters on the houses the same hard blue against mud-grey walls; orange bowerbirds that weave their basket nests in feathery acacias; gleaming black gardeners sluicing water from leather skins, lovingly, on rows of blue-green onions; lean aristocratic Touaregs, of supernatural appearance, with coloured leather shields and shining spears, their faces encased in indigo veils, which, like carbon paper, dye their skin a thunder-cloud blue; wild Moors with corkscrew curls; firm-breasted Bela girls of the old slave caste, stripped to the waist, pounding at their mortars and keeping time with monotonous tunes; and monumental Songhai ladies with great basketshaped earrings like those worn by the Queen of Ur over four thousand years ago.
    And at night the half-calabash moon reflected in the river of oxidised silver, rippled with the activity of insects; white egrets roosting in the acacias; the thumping of a tam-tam in town; the sound of spontaneous laughter welling up like clear water; the bull frogs, whining mosquitoes that prevented sleep, and on the desert side the far-off howls of jackals or the guard-dogs of nomad camps. Perhaps the Timbuctoo of the mind is more potent than one suspects.
    It has been claiming European victims, and luring many to their deaths, since it first appeared (as Tembuch) on a Catalan map of the fourteenth century. Rumours had filtered to Europe of an African Kingdom where children of the sun ran about in naked innocence ruled by a wise black monarch called Rex Melly . He was often confused with Prester John, the mysterious Christian king who, they prophesied, would rise up out of his country at the head of countless multitudes. He would smite the Infidel, reunite Christendom, and the world would settle down to an everlasting peace. Rex Melly’s kingdom was also known to the commercially minded as the inexhaustible source of red African gold. Visions of a New Jerusalem beyond the desert were more than tinged with thoughts of commercial enterprise.
    But Mansa Mussa, the King of Mali, who gave rise to the legend, was a devout Muslim. Far from smiting the Infidel, the founder of Timbuctoo gave his Arab friends so many golden handshakes on his visit to Cairo in 1324 that the price of gold took a sudden dip on the Cairo exchange. His entourage caused such a stir that a stream of merchants, artisans, scholars and architects, including an Andalucian called Es Saheli, followed him back. A great mosque, and the first black university in the world, rose up from the sand dunes.
    The gold of Timbuctoo came from a nearby country. It grew in the ground in nuggets as large as carrots. The men who brought it to market were cannibals and insisted on slave-girls for dinner. But this was a small price to pay in a barter system where gold might be exchanged for its own weight of salt.
    By the end of the eighteenth century, Earthly Paradises were in short supply. Most had evaporated under the critical gaze of geographers. The African Association was founded, and was determined that a Britisher should be the first European to set foot in Timbuctoo. And so he did. He did not return. Major Gordon Laing arrived in Timbuctoo in 1826. He wore his uniform throughout, talked grandly of his master, the King of England, and ostentatiously made notes and plans of the city. He was murdered by his escort on leaving the city after refusing conversion to Islam (and probably slavery thereafter).
    Two years later the French announced that a Monsieur René Caillié had reached the lost city, dressed as a poor Arab, and returned alive. ‘I had formed a totally different idea of the grandeur and wealth of Timbuctoo,’ he wrote.