The Caravan of White Gold
Michael Benanav
Language: English
Pages: 161
ISBN: 2:00309714
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Maps reprinted from the original book Men of Salt
A 1,600 km odyssey through the sahara desert. Driven to get a glimpse of an ancient way of life before it disappeared from the planet forever, author michael benanav embarked on a 1600 kilometer odyssey by foot and by camel, through a swath of the sahara desert so deadly it's called 'the land of terror' by the nomads who cross it. Joining up with the caravan of white gold -one of the last working camel caravans in the world -benanav followed an age-old trade route, transporting gleaming slabs of solid rock salt from mines deep in the desert to the market in timbuktu. Once literally worth its weight in gold, which gives the caravan its name, the salt today is worth just pennies a pound, but men still risk their lives to haul it and sell it. Benanav lived for weeks among the camel drivers as they traveled eighteen hours a day for nearly six weeks, through sandstorms and searing heat. Along the way, he learned how to care for and ride camels, became a medic to injured salt miners, encountered an islamic culture in which men -not women -veil their faces and grappled with the dilemmas of cultural extinction created by the ever-spreading impact of globalization.
of adjectives that describes me). Though my strides were longer, my feet sank and slid backward in the sand while Walid’s padded nimbly over the surface. Walking through the desert with a nomad was like swimming with a seal. That I was where I was, marching next to a turbaned nomad puffing smoke from a stubby, antelope-horn pipe, leading a couple of camels through the Sahara into which we were heading ever deeper, felt like exactly what I was meant to be doing. With my health definitively on the
years among Tuareg tribes people and who kindly sent me copies of her published papers. I also looked into the history of salt in West Africa, wondering why people would go to what sounded like absurdly extreme measures to obtain this most common of commodities. But centuries ago, I learned, in the heyday of the Saharan salt trade, rock salt from the desert was exchanged “measure for measure” with gold—hence the name of the caravan. Though some scholars dispute whether the salt was literally
fifteen-year-old when he was thirty-six. From the sound of things, that girl’s family may have feared she’d end up as an old maid. There have been moments in my travels when I’ve met young women so beautiful that I’ve been seized with the fantasy of marrying them and moving into a Berber village or a Kazakh tent. But no matter how cute Hannah might have been, even my unleashed id would not be drawn to a girl who hadn’t yet hit double digits. For Abdi and his people, however, marriage has little
As we moved through the night, Baba sang lilting Koranic chants, one after the next, to keep the evil spirits at bay. Images of the past few days flashed through my mind. What I’d discovered at Taoudenni was as unexpected as it had been profound. Each memory was a jewel without price and, like a beggar who stumbles upon a treasure chest, admiring them one after another made me drunk with exuberance. I had to deliberately slow my strides if I didn’t want to leave the caravan behind. After a
got the picture that my mind was made up. “One last thing,” Lamana said. “Do you eat meat?” When I said yes, of course, he laughed and said he never knew what to expect from foreigners’ dietary habits; many, he continued, inexplicably engaged in a bizarre practice called vegetarianism. As we rose to leave, I shook hands with Lamana and Walid and said, “See you tomorrow.” “Ensha’allah,” Lamana replied—meaning “God willing”—the standard Muslim reply to every statement about the future, even the