Hold the Enlightenment (11 page)

The excavations were all of a size: rectangular holes about ten by twenty feet and perhaps fifteen feet deep. They’d been dug by hand, and the dirt was piled high around the craters.

The basin surrounding the many-footed sphinx, I imagined, had once been completely underwater: a vast inland lake, something like the Great Salt Lake in Utah. As the climate changed and the water evaporated away, minerals were deposited in the old lake bed. Centuries of blowing sand buried the salt about ten feet deep.

The good, glittering white salt was concentrated in a layer about three feet thick. It was covered over in a layer of dirty brown salt that some workers had chopped out in blocks to make small shelters. The men who dug in the pits were mostly blacks, and they used handmade axes and picks to dig out the salt, to file away the inferior brown mineral, and to smooth the edges of the blocks so they could be loaded on the camels, which knelt obediently in the sand and were loaded right at the pits. The camel drivers were Tuaregs or Arabs. Ringing the mines were sixteen different caravans of sixty to seventy camels apiece, at least a thousand animals. In the distance, I counted five more pack strings, three of which were loaded and on their way out.

At sunset, Mossa, in his capacity as security bandit, made a point of gathering everyone up and getting us all out of the mines before dark. We would camp a good distance away from the work crews, far to the northeast, on the edge of an abandoned part of the mine where old excavations were gradually filling with sand. In the morning, we’d walk through the mines one more time and leave early in the afternoon for Timbuktu, so the Italians could catch their flight. Families would be expecting them, Dario told me, and family came first.

By the next morning, the
harmattan
had kicked into high gear. The goofy landmarks—the cone and pyramid—began to shimmer and fade in the distance. Wind-driven sand snakes raced across the desert floor.

I pulled the neck portion of my chêche up over my face. Visibility was down to two hundred yards, and I wandered off into the desert to relieve myself in the privacy veil provided by blowing sand. I walked several hundred yards, then looked back. I couldn’t see the camp and assumed they couldn’t see me. The wind was on my left shoulder. I did my business and went back, navigating by the simple expedient of putting the wind on my right shoulder.

At camp, Amen had some bad news. Gigi was missing. Clint Eastwood–looking Roberto was sitting on the ground, beside the Land Rover, and he was literally wringing his hands in an agony of guilt. He’d been walking with Gigi. Gigi had dithered. Roberto had left him somewhere in the mines. Now he was gone.

We put together a search party and, with Dario in the lead, retraced the steps Gigi had taken. Alberto, meanwhile, had hired men on camels to ride in a widening spiral around the mines, looking for a man on foot.

Dario, athletic and decisive, ran ahead, scaling the highest of the excavations, where he’d be more likely to see Gigi, especially if he was lying injured in one of the old pits. Clint Eastwood–looking Roberto trudged through the sand in a hopeless fashion. He was known in Italy as a great hunter, but all his skills were useless to him here. The sandstorm had swept the desert floor clear of tracks. To me, the mines seemed a hopeless labyrinth. Including the abandoned
sections, I estimated about five square miles of closely spaced pits, more than a thousand of them.

We straggled back into camp well after dark.

There’d been no sign of Gigi.

After dark, Intarka stood on the roof of the Land Rover with a handheld spotlight and spun the beam through a slow 360-degree circuit. He did this tirelessly and for hours. Perhaps Gigi would see the light and follow it to the source.

Alberto drove around the mines to a small collection of salt-block houses directly opposite our camp. It was the only thing that resembled a settlement that we’d seen. Someone, we all felt, must have kidnapped Gigi. Alberto’s plan was to offer money, diplomatically, for the return of our friend.

There were no police in the settlement, no soldiers, no secular authorities at all. The men of the mines, however, had submitted themselves to the moral authority of the
marabout
, a minor Muslim cleric who knew the Koran and who settled various disputes. Alberto met him in a salt-block courtyard illuminated by lanterns.

The
marabout
looked the part: an ascetic man of about fifty with an untrimmed beard going to white. He wore a brown robe and a black chêche, and he carried his authority with a degree of nobility. He told Alberto that he knew the kind of men who lived in the mines and that none of them was a killer or a robber or a kidnapper. He felt Gigi was somewhere safe, perhaps staying with people until the morning. The
marabout
offered a prayer for Gigi and said, “I think you will find your friend in one day and that he will not be injured.”

Alberto arrived back in our camp and said that he’d been impressed with the
marabout
. Still, he’d organized and paid in advance for a fifty-man search party to leave at dawn. In the distance, toward the mines, we could see lights moving in our direction. They were flashlights, held by people who wanted us to know they were coming to talk and were not sneaking up on us for an ambush.
There were dozens of men. We interviewed them one by one.

An Arab with a broken foot said he’d seen one of the white men walk out into the desert about noon, just when the sandstorm was at its worst.

“What did he look like?” Alberto asked.

“Blue chêche. He was the big one.”

“Alberto,” I said, “this guy’s a moron. I’m standing right in front of him wearing a blue chêche. I’m the big one.”

“Did you walk out into the desert?”

“To take a crap.”

And so it went, for hours.

Clint Eastwood–looking Roberto sat in one of the cars, chain-smoking cigarettes. He blamed himself, and his eyes were red-rimmed from crying. Pepino-Roberto sat with him, assuring the grief-stricken man that Gigi’s disappearance wasn’t his fault. Things would work out.

At about 2
A.M
. a tall Arab mounted elegantly on a sleek camel rode into camp along with four or five men on foot who seemed to be his retinue. The man wore a fine green robe and had the air of a dignitary. “Your friend,” he said, “is staying with some people.” He, the Arab, knew these people. He could buy Gigi back for us. It would cost 500,000 African francs, about $1,000.

Dario said, “You see, the Arab people do their business at night.” It was less an expression of prejudice than one of hope. Dario had agreed with me earlier in the evening: he too thought Gigi was dead. Now, for $1,000, that sorrow could be instantly lifted from his soul.

Alberto bargained with the Arab. He would give only 50,000 francs up front, the rest to be paid when we saw Gigi alive and well. The Arab dismounted, spat on the ground, and stood too close to Alberto. “Five hundred thousand now,” he said. “Then maybe you will see your friend.”

Alberto turned and nodded to the white Land Cruiser behind him, where Mossa, Baye, and Baye were smoking cigarettes and monitoring the conversation. Mossa snapped on his headlights, and
the tall Arab stood there blinking in the sudden glare. All three Tuaregs stepped out of the car, their black chêches worn up, in mask mode. The tall Arab, half blinded and confused, now looked as if all his internal organs had suddenly collapsed. I have seldom seen such outright fear on a man’s face.

Mossa shouted three harsh words, and the tall Arab, along with his entourage, disappeared rapidly into the night.

No one slept. People kept wandering into camp with another tidbit of information. About four in the morning, a young Arab appeared and said that earlier in the evening he’d seen a white man walking toward the well at Taoudenni. This didn’t seem right. The well was ten miles away and almost 180 degrees in the wrong direction. Gigi knew how to get around outdoors. Plus, Alberto had already been to the well, and none of the men there had seen Gigi.

Still, the young Arab seemed guileless. He was about eighteen and knew nothing about our offer of a reward to anyone who found Gigi alive. The Arab said he had seen an older man walking alone and a spotlight beaming in the distance.

Now, a white man walking in the desert at night was an extremely odd circumstance. So was the light. The young Arab had put the two together instantly: the light was for the white man. He had tried to tell him that, but the man just kept walking, staring at the ground and smiling vaguely. He had touched the man’s arm and tried to turn him so he could see the light. But the man would not turn. He only made this strange gesture: the Arab dropped his hands to his sides.

“Wait a minute,” I said, nearly shouting. “Do that again. Do it the way he did it.”

The Arab turned his hands and moved them lightly up and down, as if patting two small children on the head. It was Gigi’s futility gesture.

Goddamn! Gigi, still alive, was somewhere near the Taoudenni well.

Alberto, Pepino-Roberto, Chris, Mossa, and I sped overland in the eerie silver light of false dawn. We skidded to a stop at the well. There was a ruined French fort, an abandoned prison, and a defunct armored personnel carrier parked nearby. The sun was just rising, an enormous sphere balanced on the horizon, and its light, in the lingering haze of the sandstorm, was the lurid red of flowing blood. When I looked back toward the prison, there was a man walking our way. He cast a shadow thirty feet long, and it rose high and red on the whitewashed walls of the prison.

“Gigi!” I screamed.

Mossa had already seen him and was running over the sand, with me sprinting behind and steadily losing ground. Mossa hit Gigi like a linebacker and nearly knocked him over with an embrace. The car sped by me. Alberto was hugging Gigi when I got there, so Mossa hugged me. His eyes were tearing over. He wasn’t crying—I couldn’t imagine Mossa ever crying—but he was overcome with emotion. Pepino, walking in his heavy, dignified way, was sobbing openly, drying his eyes with a clean white handkerchief.

We offered Gigi some water, and he took a small sip, as if to be polite. He’d been lost in the Sahara, without a canteen, for twenty-two hours. He drank two more sips, then patted some children on the head to indicate that, no, no, he didn’t want any more.

Back at our camp, Alberto paid the Arab the promised reward. Dario and Clint Eastwood–looking Roberto were taking turns embracing Gigi. Their gestures were elegantly expressive, fully Italian. Roberto, weeping, hugged Gigi, patted him on the back, and then pushed him out to arm’s length and cocked a fist as if to punch him in the mouth.

Gigi was smiling his vague smile, staring at the ground, and every time Roberto gave him a little room, he began weighing a couple of melons in explanation.

After this orgy of emotion, while everyone else was packing up for what now had to be a doubly high-speed run over the dunes to Timbuktu, Gigi and I spoke for a couple of hours. I wanted to
know what happened. We spoke in Spanish, our only common language.

Gigi told me:

He’d been walking, taking pictures, dithering around as usual, when the sandstorm hit. He’d marked his position by the various oddly shaped formations on the horizon—the many-footed sphinx, the pyramid, and the cone—and felt he would be able to tell where he was at any time by using the process of triangulation. Did I understand about triangulation? Gigi began weighing some melons in his hands.
“Por exemplo,”
he said, “if I move from here to the west, the cone would change its position on the horizon.…”

“Sí, sí, entiendo,”
I said, a bit impatiently. I understood about triangulation.

Well, in a sandstorm, Gigi explained reasonably, a
tormentosa de sable
, a man cannot see the mountains on the horizon and therefore cannot use the process of triangulation in order to fix his position. He’d been concentrating on his photos, because in the sand there were bits of clay that he was interested in and …

“So,” I said, hurrying the story along, “when you looked up from your photo …”

The sand, Gigi said, was blowing and he couldn’t see, so he just began walking but he must have gotten turned around taking the photos, and he walked the wrong way. He was walking almost directly into the wind, to the northeast, the direction of the
harmattan
, and he should have known that was wrong, but he was thinking about other things.

I almost asked what he was thinking about but quelled the impulse. At this point we’d been working on the story for an hour.

It was actually painful, walking into the blowing sand, so Gigi sat down for an hour or two, with his back to the wind. By late that afternoon, the storm had blown itself out, but the distant mountains, his triangulation points, were still obscured in the
harmattan
haze. Gigi walked in a large circle, hoping to see the rubble and excavation of the salt mines. But it was just a level plain of sand. He sat down to think again, admired the sunset, and then got up, picked a direction at random, and began walking.

It was dark when a young man came up to him and began speaking
in a language Gigi took to be Arabic. Gigi tried to project the image of an Italian gentleman out on an evening stroll, preoccupied with his own thoughts and unwilling to be bothered. The young man grabbed his arm as if he wanted him to turn and go the other way. Gigi had some preconceived notions about Arabs in the dark and so he refused to turn and see the light. In the day, Gigi said, it might have been different. He continued walking, smiling at the ground and making his it-is-useless gesture of patting children on the head. The Arab shrugged and left him. Gigi felt he’d handled the encounter well.

He walked for several more hours until he saw the lights of some campfires reflecting off a whitewashed building in the distance. As he got closer, he could see figures moving around the fires, then he could hear the shouts and laughter of people conversing in Arabic. They seemed to be camped around a well.